Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/8531335.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Homestuck
  Relationship:
      Dirk's_Bro_|_Alpha_Dave_Strider/Dirk_Strider, Jake_English/Dirk_Strider
  Character:
      Dirk_Strider, Dirk's_Bro_|_Alpha_Dave_Strider, Roxy_Lalonde, Auto-
      Responder_|_Lil_Hal, Roxy's_Mom_|_Alpha_Rose_Lalonde, Jake_English, Jane
      Crocker
  Additional Tags:
      Post-Sburb/Sgrub, Disassociation, Effects_of_Dirk_living_in_solitude_for
      16_years, Post-Traumatic_Stress_Disorder_-_PTSD, time_travel_kind_of?,
      Memory_Loss
  Stats:
      Published: 2016-11-12 Updated: 2017-01-29 Chapters: 2/? Words: 12137
****** Built on Glass ******
by orphan_account
Summary
     Your name is Dirk Strider, and for the past sixteen years you've been
     living alone above the ocean. Today, you were supposed to play a game
     with your friends that would've changed everything. You would've met
     your bro, Roxy would've met her mom, and you both would've met your
     best friends.
     Instead, you wake up alone on a busy street.
***** Chapter 1 *****
Before consciousness fully returns from wherever it retreated, your environment
is assaulting your senses. Bright light beats harshly against your unopened
eyes - stinging them before you’ve even slid them open - and sharp blaring
noises bombard you from every direction. Indistinct chatter, the whoosh -
whoosh of wind resistence against something large moving fast, a brief clatter,
yelling, the ring of a bell and the distant sound of a horn all around you,
noises melding together almost indiscernibly. Your eyes open and immediately
close again with tears welling up beneath the lids. Frantically you scramble to
your feet but still you’re moving blind as you fumble with the arms of your
shades, spreading them open and hooking them over your ears, making your best
effort not to drop them even as your hands shake and fumble. The tint doesn’t
help any when you attempt again to open your eyes and you can see no better -
your feet slip backward from one level to another, ankle nearly buckling under
your unsteady weight. You manage to stay upright - (albeit wobbly) - in the
face of this shift, but that changes the moment that something directly to your
right makes a deafeningly loud sound. You scramble forward on unsteady legs and
trip over the step you’d just descended, falling on your elbows and knees with
your hands clapped tight over your ears. You scream viscerally in response, a
short shriek back at that sudden horn.
Both palms hit stone soon after, skidding over dirt and other sharp particles
that dig into your palms through the leather, something else oddly slick and
sticky sliding under your fingertips. You scramble to presumed safety in the
opposite direction of that jarring sound, shuddering with every rush of wind
resistance both heard and felt at your back as... things continue to speed past
you. Your ears are ringing, but you can feel - and now almost see - shapes of
invariable size, color, and texture that retreat from your path out of the
corner of your eye as you scramble. Noise increases around you - voices that
make words you can’t quite parse the meaning of in your state - it all sounds
like vaguely familiar gibberish but so clear and untampered while also
indecipherable given that fact. You crawl back into a concerningly damp and
gritty space away from those sounds and try to get a god-damn solid fucking
hold on yourself.
No reprieve is given from the advancing amble of those figures in pairs, even
as you huddle your legs in close to your chest and bunch yourself against cool
brick or stone. Your breath comes fast and your vision is a little blurry, all
of your senses overwhelmed. Even still as these blurry silhouettes come closer,
they lose detail in favor of the background.
Likely hundreds of live humans hurl past you behind these eerie structures.
Along a four-lane road, cars zoom by at an initially sluggish but incrementally
speeding pace. The scent of gasoline is heavy, stinging your nose to the point
of eye-watering, and your ears are tuned unforgivingly to the rumble of fit and
mechanically fucked systems both. New and old engines, varying degrees of
mechanical problems, varying situations of people--
You refuse to believe it
Something brushes your shoulder and the moment that you register that touch one
of your hands raise to swat it away, flicking the full force of your hand back
against that soft press. It gives immediately under your touch, your hand
momentarily sinking against the soft cushion - it is a sensation unlike one
you’ve ever really met. Stuffed plush comes close, but the texture of the
fabric is all wrong -
Your wide eyes refocus to follow the motion of your hand, soon meeting eye-to-
eye with another human. It’s hand curls away from yours, and an expression more
subtle than comic or dramatic meets yours. Shock, you think, though it is
magnificently underplayed and almost as soon as you recognize it the emotion
melts away.
Another human, sitting so simply almost uncomfortably close to you. Your breath
comes in short, disbelieving wheezes and you lean back, away from it. A being
made of the same material as you, with the same level of sentience. Someone
that you don’t know, that you’ve never met before, that doesn’t know you. Face
to face.
The sight is so uncanny you feel a roll of nausea in your stomach and a type of
fear and unsettlement you can’t describe. On a screen they seem so much more
normal but to see the depths and shadows of this man’s face right in front of
you - it’s just so ugly. So out of place. So uncontrolled. Just not - not
right. Not right at all. You can recognize just barely now that he’s halfway
through a likely repeated sentence - are you - before your attention shifts
instead to another person, standing in front of you, her eyes on the one still
talking to you - call an ambulance? - it turns into a buzz of the people
crowding around you slowly getting closer and more voluminous. Is he - they
pack in close - wrong? - the one closest to you, that touched you, puts out a
hand to stop them - happened? - it tells the rest to back up - get hit? - the
closest do - on their way -but they’re still too much. So many of them are
different, different faces, different colors, different tones, different
heights but none of them look anything like people. None of them are familiar.
It’s far too overwhelming. They press to close and assert themselves too
casually and you just have to get out.You can’t be here anymore, crushed by
their thoughtless proximity. You push yourself up and away from them too fast
for them to track, making a mad dash for any kind of safety that you can scope
out. In this condition, you shouldn’t be flash stepping - and it speaks to the
danger of it that the next thing you know you’re flush against a trembling
chain-link fence. Just like when you were a kid, you don’t know where you’re
going until you hit something.
For a few graciously undisturbed minutes, you lean into the unsuitable cradle
of the fence and curl your dirtied fingers into it’s rusted slots. Your body
naturally gravitates to the place where the fence is split, rusted all the way
up in an ugly gash of the links. Like a gaping wound. You barely have enough
control of yourself to pull yourself away from the minor threat.
Your senses are abused. They refuse to calm: all of them picking up something
new, something disturbing with every second that they remain active and you
wish - you fucking wish - that you could just turn it off. Deep shame settles
in with everything else as you sob and try to tuck yourself into your own body
with hunched shoulders and a scrunched stomach. You duck your head and curl
both hands tightly into the fence with your knuckles pressed hard to your
forehead. You’re crying, now, too. On top of being overwhelmed and confused.
Great. Aren’t you just the paragon of stability.
It takes you a couple minutes to securely get a fucking grip on yourself, and
not one second is spent under any illusion of safety. When you finally recover,
the first thing that you do is appraise your surroundings. Even just on a
visual level this place is overwhelming. Your wide eyes survey the grimy
stretch of concrete beyond the fence that you cling to, caught
claustrophobically between two stretches of brick walls. You disengage from the
fence and turn to look back the way that you came, standing in the shade of the
same two brick buildings, looking back to the busy street and taking a moment
to watch the irregular stumblings of a multitude of people on the other side of
it.
Nausea swells up again, so you turn back to the fence and contemplate clinging
onto it again to brace yourself. You shake your head, even that seems like too
much for you to handle. Taking a breath, you close your eyes and attempting
rationalization.
Fantasy or reality? Last you remember you were bidding Jake off well past his
bedtime, ushering him off at ten o’clock at night - (his time, do you really
look like the kind of dude that nods off with his blankie in hand before the
night rolls over? Fuck no) - in preparation for the next busy day of cyborg-
rabbit construction that would follow.
Ten o’clock Jake’s time equated to just past four in the morning for you.
Everything past that is… blank. You’ve always been constantly aware and active,
be it as one waking self or the other, and sleep, for you, had always meant
Derse.Could it be possible that this was a dream? You’d always been under the
impression that “normal” dreams were never so vivid or lucid...
Dual selves had recently become something of an afterthought, as well.
Naturally the extent of your realistic mental presence as one self was limited,
however slightly, by your concentration on the other one, and due to the nature
of your ruse in Derse it wasn’t unnatural for you to relax there a little more.
Recently, that is to say, it’s been easier for you to forget the persistent
awareness of your Dersian self.
It’s more of a shock than it should be when you reach for your dream self only
to grasp at nothing. There is no dual consciousness to seat yourself into.
There’s nothing there but an aching vacancy.
Coming back to yourself, you find yourself cursed again with a dangerous
irregularity of breathing and a pressing anxiety flitting annoyingly about your
consciousness. You’re torn, for a moment, between smashing your head against
the brick wall and huddling down to weep and wail like a confused kitten
separated from the rest of the trash-bag litter. Instead you stare down at your
shoelaces and ponder the exact hex code of that shade of white (never a pure
sextet of “f”s, that extent of purity was practically unheard of) while you try
to process the exact weight of your realization.
Assassinated. Your dream self was assassinated and this vivid, hellish
nightmare was your punishment for your neglect.
It probably happened when you were busy toying with Jake; trying,
simultaneously, to repair what damage your autoresponder had done and fish from
that hopeless jungle boy a mixture of laughter and flustered responses that
made your insides grossly warm and fluttery. In some expression of frustration
or exasperation you are tempted to raise your hands to your face, but they’re
fucking filthy and whether or not this is a dream you can’t bare to push that
much grease and dirt and bacteria and who knows whatinto your pores. A shiver
runs through you at the thought and you contemplate wiping them off on your
pants before inevitably just trying your best to dismiss the thought and
reaching for your sylladex instead.
You’re met with nothing, because why wouldn’t you be. It would be one thing if
you discovered it empty, but it’s an entirely separate slap to the face to find
it nonexistent. Your chest tightens with another wash of panic before you push
the impulse away with a fresh wave of annoyance to replace it, growing
increasingly irritated with every emotional surge.
You don’t have Cal, you don’t have Sawtooth, and you don’t have Squarewave. But
it’s just a dream, and getting upset over that is all kinds of fucking
pathetic. That’s probably how it works in a dream - a nightmare - right? You’re
alone. No one wants to be alone. It’s normal. No need to throw a fucking bitch-
fit over a phenomenon that you’re perfectly aware of. Especially when it’s
temporary and, get this, fake.
Taking a few steady breaths, you open the interface of your glasses.
Immediately you’re met with a very insistent notification that you don’t have
an internet connection and you frown in the face of yet another problem that
you’ve never encountered before. Unfamiliarity, it seems, is the overly-
oppressive theme of this “subconscious” dive. Stifling your unease with more
persistent annoyance, you look to the icon that shows whether or not the
autoresponder is enabled.
The autoresponder is missing all together, just like everything else, and your
heart drops into the pit of your stomach. You draw a ragged breath and close
your eyes, redirecting your attention to a productive distraction.
Aside from a few personal logs and the GPS, your shades are in practicality
worth little more than atypically cool protective eyewear with some extra
crossed wires and a camera roll-- and your GPS, now that you get a look at it,
is actually even less functional than usual. It neglects outright to show you
the network of landmarks that you had set in waypoints, and instead offers only
point a, your current position, and point b, your apartment’s coordinates.
It’s distinctly fucking suspicious, as the only bone that you’ve been thrown
since you’ve been here and as a blunt directive. “Go here, and don’t think
about going anywhere else ‘cause there’s nowhere else to go.” True that may be,
it still strikes you as a little rude.
Rude. Huh. Are you really getting offended by your subconscious giving you
forthright directions? You’re getting pissy at yourself for giving you a clear
directive as to how to progress.
The ridiculousness of that very nearly stuns you into blind complacency, and
you spend another couple minutes arguing the sanity of complying with yourself.
So what if you were told to, it’s what you planned to do to begin with - Jesus
Kringlefucker, Dirk, what else are you going to do, wander away from possibly
the only beacon of familiarity that you’ll get here? You sigh and clear your
head with a terse shake before stalking deliberately to the opening of the
alleyway as you had entered minutes before.
Admittedly the prospect of navigation - even with a semi-useful, exanimate pair
of shades - is a bit intimidating once you get closer to the action. Cars
streak past left and right, and humans traipse more anarchically in every
direction at different speeds with varying levels of aggression and purpose.
You linger for longer than you’d like to allow yourself at the mouth of the
backstreet, charting and recharting your route down the street and across the
road.
It takes you an annoying long time to get moving, but eventually you slip out
of the shadow between the buildings and make your way down the road, walking
parallel to the street and hanging far behind a group of people in front of
you. Even from this distance they put you on edge, so you try to tune out their
galimatias and don’t keep your eye on any of them for too long. They gaggle and
move in awkward motions that alternate between smooth and jerking, swaying and
seeming so awkward and unsteady while they miraculously keep balance. They move
noisily. You can hear the one behind you kicking a rock along the pathway as he
slowly gets nearer.
You cross quickly, spooked from your already cautious integration. Almost
skittish, you hop between and briefly over vehicles too quick to be tracked.
This side of the street, however temporarily, was mostly unoccupied and
provided a cozy, empty cubby for you to tuck into.
Once you’ve crossed and ducked into that alley, you come to a cautious stop
sheltered by the buildings on either side of you and measure your surroundings
against the GPS. As far as you can tell on the map, you’re not far from your
apartment. Granted, travelling nautically is different from travelling by foot
and you still have a repeat performance of your most recent stunt to
accomplish. If you’re correctly comparing what’s on the map to what’s in front
of you, once you cross there should only be a couple of buildings between you
and familiarity. You’ve never had to bother with learning the street-level
layout of your neighborhood, but it seems straightforward enough. You’d still
rather deal with a nosy shark than what’s supposed to be your own species, but
for the time being this is what you’re stuck with.
Flexing your shaking and still-filthy hands in an attempt to dust off the
former issue, you skirt around an overfull dumpster and survey the second
street. It’s less crowded by pedestrians, but the road is more congested than
the last. You spend a moment tracking the few people that litter the walkways
as you approach the curb, tentatively verging out from the safety of the shade.
When you finally breach the road, you navigate the traffic more carefully than
before, but still cross as fast as possible. If you don’t operate on anonymity
and absolute stealth, you’re not sure you could handle the deadlock of this
overpopulation.
The GPS reads that you’re practically on top of the pin now, and in an attempt
to confirm, you look up and gauge the heights of surrounding buildings against
the skyscraper that you stop yourself beneath. You’ve never been down this far
below your apartment, and don’t actually know how far up your room was, but you
were familiar enough with the heights of the other buildings around yours from
either the roof of your house or the water below it. Looking straight up, like
some kind of fucking idiot, you spend a couple seconds starting out some
formulas to figure out the relative heights of each of these buildings-
Another human passes by you, just barely edging into your peripheral vision,
and you bristle out like a startled cat. On your toes. All floofed out. Doing
the kitty two-step to get the fuck out of that particular situation. More
accurately, your entire body tenses up and you look away immediately, pushing
open the door to what you sure fucking hope is your building.
Diving was one of your main pass-times back home and, while you never got
especially deep with your equipment, you know from experience that most of the
buildings surrounding your apartment look the same on the inside, give or take
some amenities. From a first glance, you can’t confirm that this is the same
building, but the similarities are close enough to be reassuring. The walls are
a flat beige, stained in places but mostly relieved of water damage. You
quietly navigate the lower floor in search of the stairwell, and incidentally
flinch straight into it in a rush to duck away from a suddenly-opening door.
Your heart thrums, embarrassingly panicky, as you begin to climb.
The building is absurdly tall but you estimate that you’re about halfway up
when a woman starts trotting down the stairs that you climb up. She looks up
when she notices you, frowns and stops when you stiffen up. You resolutely look
away and jog up the stairs a little faster. A peculiar knot forms between your
shoulders, head ducked down, and the feeling is almost indistinguishable from
the sensation of being stalked by one of your kill-bots. If not less
predictable.
You make it to the top shortly after, met with two doors and another smaller
staircase up to the roof of the building. One door leads to a vacant (as you
remember it) apartment, and the other has your familiar apartment number on it.
You shudder a relieved, erratic sigh and try the knob. It’s locked.
Being locked out of your apartment has never been that big of a deal and it
shouldn’t be a big deal now, (this is a dream,) but you stand staring at the
door-knob like an airhead for almost a full minute just trying to process that
the door is locked in the first place. You’ve locked the front door a couple of
times before (mostly as a way to fuck with yourself) and it’s not like you’ve
never been in this situation before, but despite the extent of your attempts to
catch yourself off guard, you always expected the door to be locked. And, this
time, the circumstances and consequences are a bit... weightier.
On a normal day you might be able to pick it or otherwise tamper with it, but
today you have nothing but a shitty pair of glasses on your person. The
alternative is opening a window from the outside and facing a potential
fourteen story drop if you fuck up. You’ve done it before, but only under more
resourceful circumstances with a shorter drop and a better chance of getting
caught.
Just in case, you pat your pockets down to check how unprepared you really are,
but predictably find jack shit. You’ve never put anything in your pockets for
more than a couple minutes before so, while you’re not surprised, you are…
displeased.  Your options are the roof or plan C. You’ve yet to figure out the
details on plan C, but you do know that the “C” stands for “Chicken.” Plan C
would only happen in the event that you can’t bring yourself to dangle over a
significantly vast drop, which you have done before. In real life that isn’t a
dream. You should be able to do this.
While climbing the last flight of stairs up to the roof, you can at least admit
to yourself that “expect the door to be unlocked” was a shitty plan A.
It’s hard not to picture what would happen to you if you fuck up. Over and over
again you reassure yourself: you’ve done this before. You’ve done this
comfortably before. On numerous occasions. Before you started using the handy
closet exit, popping in and out of your window over a sixty-four foot drop was
your only mode of transportation in and out of your room and, for the majority
of that time, Sawtooth wasn’t even around to catch you. Just you and your two
hands. If you could do it when you were a kid, you could certainly fucking do
it now. No problem. So what if the drop is twice the size? You’re not going to
die as an ugly sidewalk Pollock painting, splattered all over the concrete. Or
someone’s car. Or maybe you’ll land on someone. Or on a group. Maybe the
asshole that writes about it in the paper will compare it to bowling or
paintball.
Fuck. It’s not going to happen. Stop it.
Somehow, still, this is less daunting than interacting with the people in the
streets or being suffocated by the crowds on the ground.
You approach the edge of the roof at the proper spot and hold your glasses to
your face with one hand as you peer over and confirm that the window you had in
mind is down below. Crouching down, you make a concentrated effort not to look
past your goal and carefully pull yourself over the edge of the roof, swinging
yourself to grip the appropriate ledges and set your feet in the proper
precarious places. You can’t be sure that they are in the same places that you
remember them, as the detail is a bit too minuscule to be focusing on at the
current moment. Instead, you take a deep breath and weigh your chances that the
window you intend to wiggle open is locked.
Lowering yourself a little further carefully to compensate for the small
crawlspace above the apartment, you adjust the grip of one hand and steady the
placement of your feet as you reach down to push and pull at the glass of the
window just beneath you. You can feel the smear of whatever gross, sticky crap
you slapped your hand into earlier, but you keep working despite that. You
measure your breaths carefully to keep calm as the window starts to give under
your coaxing tugs and shoves, sliding slowly up. You guide it a few inches
before returning your hand to it’s position holding you up and slipping your
foot into the gap between the window and the window sill, pulling it open the
rest of the way.
Without making a big fuss about it mentally, you shimmy over and pull yourself
into the window feet first. Your heart jumps in your chest as your feet scrape
and kick against a flat surface level with the window before - a couple feet in
- hooking over the edge of whatever it is. It unbalanced you a little bit,
enough to make you nervous. You carefully slide the rest of the way into the
room.
You shut the window behind you and survey the room that you dropped yourself
into.
Part of you is disappointed that it looks nothing like your room, but in
retrospect it’s what you should have expected. At variance with your image of
your room, this one is painfully simple. At one point it might have been
personalized, but now it was only left with a small, unmade double bed and a
night table, two bare desks and a basic, beaten dresser. There isn’t a pile of
hats, puppets, and robojunk at the foot of the bed. Lil Cal isn’t waiting for
you on one of the barren desks. There isn’t a trace of Squarewave or your
rocket board anywhere in the room. It’s grossly uncluttered. There is a pillow
pushed against the wall on the bed, and half of the dresser drawers are pulled
open partway. A lamp sits on the night-table, and the desk that you lean
against has a few coffee stains on its surface. The walls have holes from tacks
and tape still clinging to their surfaces.
Everything is dusty. No one lives here right now.
You thought that getting into your own apartment again would be a relief, but
all it provides you is a reprieve from the pressure of crowds. Someone else
clearly lives here, and try as you might to cling to your entitlement - (this
is your fucking apartment) - the contrast is too distinct for you to really
settle down. Additionally, it’s fucking filthy. Whoever lives here, though,
hasn’t been here in a long time and at least you have the comfort of solitude
that likely won’t be interrupted anytime soon. You push away from the desk and
cross the room to the door, careful to step lightly. Ordinarily this door
wouldn’t open with Snoop Dogg’s giant, immovable bust shoved in front of it,
you always had to deploy Other Means to get in and out of your room. Hence the
familiarity with hand-holds on the brick outside.
The apartment is still shaped like yours, though. The bathroom is down the hall
to your left, and the living room should be in the opposite direction and in
front of you are two closets and a cupboard: the linen cupboard, the air
conditioning unit, and the water heater. You hover just outside of the door for
a few seconds before turning toward the front of the apartment and walking out
into the living room. The kitchen is still to your left, but the rest is
rearranged.
The couch is a simple futon facing a modest TV, and while the room is just as
bare as the other, there are more hints of living here. A few canvases are hung
up with various things painted on them - some flowers that look a little bit
like vaginas, outright nude women and men. There are more innocent paintings
too, like birds or the same black cat on two small canvases. You stray closer
to the couch and inspect a few magazines without touching them - some are
clearly pornographic, others display genuine interests in pop culture or
movies.
You also glimpse some more familiar posters that make your eyebrows raise.
Complacency of the Learned, Volume 1. Roxy’s mother is evidently alive, now.
And producing. The poster doesn’t look new, necessarily - covered in dust just
like everything else - and you can’t compare the release date against the
current period. This could mean that your bro is alive, too, but you won’t get
your hopes up yet.
The date on the interface of your shades unhelpfully supplies that it is
November 11th, 2425. Your usual year. The same date from this morning when
you’d swept Jake off to bed. That seems a little odd, but you’re not exactly
well versed in the actual mechanics of a dream. You’ve read plenty on what
normal dreaming is like, the “pinch me” theory, the clock theory, the reading
theory - people are obsessed with trying to figure out if they’re actually in a
dream or not.
For another couple of minutes you stand still and take in the oddities of your
setting. There are blankets thrown over the back of the futon, some look hand-
knit and some display a clear tag at one corner or another - you figure that
means that they were store-bought. There’s an oddly detailed pillow shaped like
a dick where the couch is pressed against the wall. You squint at it for a
while, lips pressed thin.
Done with that, you head back toward the kitchen which has the same countertops
that you’re used to. All that is left atop them is half a bottle of lavender
liquid hand soap and what looks like a quarter of a bottle of dish soap. You
take the opportunity to wash your hands and your gloves gently but diligently,
leaving the leather mitts on the counter to dry and pulling open the fridge.
It’s empty. Completely. The chances of no one living here ramp up
significantly. Before you close the door you notice a streak of dark grime or
residue or, God fucking forbid, mold clinging to one of the shelves. Your nose
wrinkles, a shiver rolls through you, and you don’t bother to investigate the
freezer before leaving the kitchen all together and returning to the center of
the room. You linger there for a moment and remark the vast emptiness of the
space unoccupied buy much of anything before you turn back to the hall.
The bathroom door is already slightly ajar when you approach it, pulled slowly
farther from the jamb to reveal the same cramped bathroom as always. It doesn’t
look much different from yours, except that the sink holds no place for a
toothbrush and the soap set at the other side isn’t the same that you’re used
to. You wiggle into the cramped space and shut the door behind you, giving the
shower and toilet a quick once-over before looking to the mirror.
You startle at your reflection, eyes wide and eyebrows raised. Flicking on the
bright overhead light, you ease your shades off of your face and stare at
yourself. You’ve... grown. Your face isn’t as round as it was, more angular in
the slightest ways, and you’re taller. You’re still not an adult, by any means,
and you’re kind of still passable as fifteen (nearly sixteen) but the
difference is still jarring. And unnerving.
Discomfited, you place your glasses back on the bridge of your nose and open
the medicine cabinet behind the mirror if only to escape your reflection.
Assorted junk clutters the inside in an untidy pack, nearly spilling out into
your hands when the pressure of the door is relieved. Everything fits, but only
precariously. Most notably, a row of prescription bottles is lined up top. You
examine them, most of the names unfamiliar to you, but you gather that a few
are half-used antibiotics and a few are painkillers. There are two bottles each
labeled “Ritalin” and “Adderall” respectively, both still containing a handful
or more of the capsules. You hum to yourself, put them back for later
consideration, and consider the rest.
There are a couple half-empty bottles of cough syrup and two bottles of
different face washes, one is nearly full and the other is for all intents and
purposes empty. Several bottles of nail polish hide behind a couple empty boxes
of allergy medication, along with files and clippers. A spare toothbrush and a
box of ”whitening strips” later, you close the medicine cabinet and contemplate
your findings.
Ultimately this entire endeavor is pointless. Everything here is an awkward
conglomeration of things tucked away in your subconscious, likely intended to
unnerve you. True, you find yourself disappointed that this apartment clearly
doesn’t belong to your brother, but in the end the uncertainty is what is
intended to get under your skin and you know that. What are you doing here,
really? Burning time. Waiting.
Which, you’re sure, is another slight against you. You’ve been waiting your
whole life. Waiting for contact, waiting for the game, waiting for death -
you’ve always been waiting for something, and here you are now: waiting for
this dream to end. The only difference you can see is that all of your
distractions have been revoked. With none of your projects or tools in hand,
all you have is this void apartment with unfamiliar dangers outside.
So ultimately it comes back down to distractions, as it always does.
Heaving a sigh, you survey the bathroom again and lean down to root through the
milk crate below the sink. There are a few cleaning supplies there, along with
two dusty rolls of toilet paper. You push those aside and pick up a bottle of
all-purpose cleaner and a rag that’s just as dusty as literally everything
else.
After shaking the rag out vigorously, you set to work wiping down the mirror
and diligently scraping gunk out of the edges and corners, ignoring your
reflection all the while. From there you tackle the rest of the bathroom,
focusing overmuch on ridding every surface of dust and grime. You go as far as
to wipe down everything inside the medicine cabinet from shelves to
prescription bottles.
You kill your first spider in the shower, smashing it with the bottom of a
crusty bottle of body wash.
It starts there. You end up spending the next couple of hours cleaning and
straightening the whole apartment. You dust and scrub and close drawers and
rinse the spider’s corpse down the drain. The windows get washed along with
their sills. You find a crappy vacuum in the closet with the air conditioning
unit and spend nearly three hours vacuuming and re-vacuuming all of the dust
and dirt set into the carpets and the blades of the ceiling fans.
You feel better, afterward, if a little bit ridiculous, and when you run out of
things to clean you’re… bereft. It’s getting dark outside.
Dropping down onto the couch, you sit in a heap of blankets directly on
something hard and jump immediately upright as the TV turns on, volume high.
“--announced last minute today that their anticipated rebranding--” You nearly
spill the folded blankets onto the floor searching underneath them. “-- will be
postponed if not entirely--” the TV shuts off with a distinct click.You set the
remote on the polished, straightened coffee table and heave a sigh as you sink
back down into the somewhat uncomfortable couch, pulling one of those knitted
throw blankets around yourself tightly. You’re only a little annoyed at
yourself for doing so when you’d just folded all of them.
Dream or not, you wish Cal were here. Even with your dream self in Derse you
had your best bro of debatable authenticity with you. For a couple minutes you
languish over his absence and eye the dick pillow as a potential (temporary)
substitute for your best cuddle buddy, but even ironically that verges a little
too closely to blatantly homosexual for you to be able to comfortably succumb
to the vague temptation even in private. Even the smuppets were less obvious
than that. You sigh, instead, and sag back against the couch while peering
toward the window. You half consider ambling into the other room to curl up on
the bed in there, because your body feels heavy in the way that it does when
you’re sprawled in a particularly warm patch of sunshine, but you are
predictably reluctant to move.
Instead you settle down on the couch and watch the window as the sky gets
dimmer and dimmer.
 
***** Chapter 2 *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Sunlight pours in from the window, faint in the early morning and muted by the
tint of your shades. You stare out with a series of slow blinks, head cushioned
on something soft and blankets warmly wrapped around you. The remnants of some
stray, unthought thought linger in your head and your brows furrow around it.
For a while you just drift lazily, thoughts clouded, but eventually the crooked
tilt of your glasses bothers you upright. Usually when you roused from resting,
Squarewave had already taken your glasses off.
Straightening them out, you frown at the rearranged shell of your living room.
Coherency comes quicker then and you pull up the interface of your glasses,
reading the updated date with a sinking dread in your chest. November 12th, the
day after you were meant to start the game with your friends and the day after
your dream. You shove yourself up from the couch, balling up the soft blanket
slung around your hips and tossing it to the side as you make your way to the
window.  Instead of the horizon of your ocean, the morning sun is peeking
through a foggy sky and out over dingy stone buildings and raised roads. Cars
zip by on the higher roads and navigate the parking lot fourteen stories below
your window.
Your head spins as you pull away from the window, legs numb as you wobble back
to the couch and heavily seat yourself back onto the rumpled pile of folded
blankets.
Pushing it off as a dream was more than just convenient, it was all that held
everything together. To realize that all of this is real is to realize that Cal
is gone, Sawtooth is gone, Squarewave is gone, even the AR is gone . Not only
are seven years of work down the drain without a trace, but everything that’s
held you together in all of those years, too. Your only physical friends, your
guardians, your family.
With the steady onset of emotion washing over you, (grief, anxiety, crushing
loneliness), you look down to the plush lump that you buried your hand into in
a desperate clutch for comfort, the thing that you had been clinging to all
night long, and disgust washes over you when you realize that your hand is
buried into the sack of the dick pillow.
All your life, Lil Cal has been beside you. Those first nine years before you
finished Squarewave were devoid of comfort if not for the C-man’s presence in
your life as your guardian, your best friend, your cuddle buddy. He’s been
there for every roll of anxiety, every crushing surge of emotion before you
learned to control yourself and every secret break afterward. And now he
wasn’t. Now, all that was in your reach was this ridiculous, unnecessary
phallic symbol that you were pushing your face all up on and snuggling the
hells out of not ten minutes before.
You wish it were heavier. You wish it were more solid and hard because when you
throw it with all the force you can manage against the wall, it only makes a
dissatisfying plap against the flat beige surface before dropping down to the
dingy carpet. Frustration boils up inside of you hot and all-consuming before
it spills over the top and reduces to a tense simmer. Your back hurts with all
the tension in it, your shoulders shake uncontrollably. Your cheeks are
streaked with hot, infantile tears as you resign yourself to passivity.
Cal was irreplaceable. The exact measurements of his body would never be the
same if you tried to recreate him, and you could never find paints of the exact
shade or place them in their correct places precisely. Furthermore, there were
some things about him you could just never replicate: stains and scars from
your childhood like the teeth marks and stitches, times from when you teethed
and when you split him on accident.
You could never bring yourself to restitch the first patch you made on him even
though the patchwork was unattractive and messy. That shamefully squishy and
sentimental part of you couldn’t get over the fact that he was there for your
first attempt at sewing when nobody else was, and to redo the job was to erase
a physical memory.
Jake never saw Brobot or even the AR as any more alive than his computers and
Jane’s scope was always a little too small to see Huggy Bear as what he really
was, (though, shockingly, she got further than Jake did,) but Roxy on the other
hand had at one point commented on your penchant for creating life. You had
rejected the idea immediately, then, because your hobby of fucking around with
programming and designing robots was nothing in the face of her feats in
ectobiology, even if all she made was mutant cats.
In retrospect you can see what she means. Even if you somehow manage to scrape
together the parts to recreate them and somehow rewrite all of their code line
for line, which is unlikely enough as it is, you’ll never be able to replicate
seven years of habits and memories. You may be able to teach Squarewave (2.0)
the secret handshake the two of you had refined over the years, but you don’t
know what it was that produced the particular whirr-whooping sounds he made
when he was excited to see you. And you had nothing to do with that sharp trill
he would make when Sawtooth came home and he hadn’t seen him in a while.
Sawtooth hasn’t been around in months. The last time you saw him, you think,
was back in August.
With that thought alone you cannot stifle the sob that hiccups out of your
mouth. You pull your legs up tight to your chest and tug the knit blanket over
your head. Covering your mouth with both hands, you agonize that you’ll never
feel his hugs again. Sure, they were cold and hard and nothing like when you
squeeze Cal against your chest, nothing like you imagine hugging Jake or Roxy
would feel, but he always put feeling behind them and he was never afraid to
initiate them. You had always felt like he missed you when he’d been gone a
long time and sometimes, those first couple of days after he had been gone for
a while, he would affectionately bully you in a way that you had never
programmed.
They were both learning robots, and you think that they learned most from
seeing you smile. Learned things that you could never teach them and never
program.
Normally you would hesitate to include the Auto-Responder in your family of
artificial beings, as he was more often than not a nuisance and generally
unpleasant to associate with, but now you miss even him. Unlike Sawtooth and
Squarewave, upon his initial creation the auto-responder was surprisingly
lucid; he seemed more like a person right off the bat than any other being you
created. Of course, looking back at how ridiculously docile he was in the
beginning, you know now that he was nowhere near coming into his own back then
and that he had a lot of development to go through.
Nearly three years later, you still think that he was nowhere near fully
developed.
He was annoying, misrepresentative, snarky and destructive to the best of his
capability within his restraints and on his worst days you absolutely hated
him, but on better days and in more charitable moods you could admit (if only
to yourself) that you had some sort of familial affection for him. He was like
a little brother. Or, you sometimes entertained, an awkward love child between
you and Jake.
A really awkward, unrequited love child that Jake, actually, completely
disrespects the validity of as a being and has slowly grown to hate. Which
really makes it more awkward. Like some warped Mamma Mia-style love affair,
afterwhich you were left with this shit-monger, hateful child and there was no
wedding-time reunion where Jake would walk AR down the aisle and the two of you
would rekindle whatever it is you had- ok, so it’s really nothing like that
movie at all.
… In reality, the situation was as simple as your proposal of The Project (AR),
in low spirits and Jake’s overwhelming enthusiasm over your capabilities
pushing you into a surprisingly successful product. And then Jake started
hating him almost immediately.
Obnoxious or not, you would still appreciate his company now…
Wiping your eyes with your hands, you readjust your glasses on your nose and
pull up the interface without looking at the blank space where the AR’s icon
should be. You’re met with a blank chumroll, (which stuns you for a moment
before refreshing your desperation,) so you pull up the search function only to
be met with an eternal “pending” animation.
No internet connection. Right.
You stare at the circle as it continuously loops around and around itself,
breathing with the quick swoops that it makes around itself, before eventually
closing out pesterchum and turning off the interface of your shades. If not for
the rising sun through the window you might have taken them off entirely, as
they stubbornly persist as a constant reminder of everything you're missing.
Pesterchum, the friends that you can't contact which may be just as nonexistent
as your missing family. The wallpaper, Sawtooth and Squarewave. The shape and
the blank space on the dash, the AR.
Lil Cal…
Even back before your friends and before all of your projects you still had
him. You’ve always had the C-man, and he’s always had you. Now, when you're
surrounded by a live world overfilled with people, you feel fucking empty with
how little you have. Once upon a time this was all you ever wanted, but now you
feel even more empty than you did all those years on the ocean.
The blanket cloaked around you is shed after a short tussle with the stubborn
fabric, and on shaky legs you wobble over to the window again. The streets are
filling up, the parking lot below is bustling with people, and you spare it all
a longer-than-passing glance before bending to pick up the soft pillow you’d
thrown against the wall before. Lewd shape aside, it fits nicely in your arms
as you trudge back to the couch and it feels nice under your head when you
nuzzle into the faintly darker, slightly over-full sack.
You settle into the futon, facing the erect backrest, and tug the over-large
knit blanket around your body. Sleep isn't welcomed back to you, and instead
you lay still as the room gradually, inappropriately brightens.
 
===============================================================================
 
The thought stirs in your head to set yourself into motion on something
productive, be it looking into the situation with your friends or gathering
your bearings and securing your environment, but ultimately you feel too sapped
of energy to move and have no desire to pick up your glasses given the
reminders that they offer.
You bounce between studying your environment from your position and criticizing
your own immobility. One moment you remark the scent of the couch, (which is
musty and faintly smells like you really should’ve beaten the dust from the
mattress as opposed to just patting it down,) and the next you imagine the
progress that you could make if you could just compel yourself to do something
more than wiggle your feet.
When you do eventually manage to get up, darkness is steadily approaching
outside the window and the only reason you decide to move is to alleviate the
heavy pressing on your bladder. You amble off to the bathroom with a heavy
body, but as you walk you snap and tap your fingers together, curling your
hands into tight fists and relaxing them loose as can be with every step.
You squeeze into the cramped bathroom and shut the door behind you, pushing
down your loose pants only enough to get your dick out. Just beyond the wall
you can hear movement. The scuffling of who is evidently your neighbor screwing
around in what you know to be their bedroom. You hear the clatter of drawers
opening and closing, then the sound of a drawer getting stuck and the
frustrated huffs of Whoever The Fuck trying to shake it back onto its track.
Throughout the entire observation you kind of have a hard time getting yourself
to just relax and fucking pee, but you finish up and tug your pants back up.
You’re glad for the obnoxiously loud sound of the toilet flushing, if only to
drown out the surreal sound of organic life not ten feet away.
With that train of thought in mind, you pull the shower door open and peer in
with consideration. If you went back to the living room it would only be to
mope more. What would be the difference if you just turned on the shower and
squatted in the corner while you reveled in your misery? At least this way you
would have that odd comfort of your skin practically being boiled off by the
scalding water. For as long as you could handle it, at least.
Mind made up, you prop the door open while you strip out of your clothes and
dump them into the sink. Your shades were left in the other room and, while the
bathroom light is nearly blinding, you’re thankful that you don’t have to worry
about them. Assuming that these glasses are different from the ones that housed
your AR, they might not be quite as resistant to the steam.
You muse numbly as you turn the water on hot and full blast, waiting a few
seconds before stepping under the stream. (Which is less of a stream and more
of a harsh hammering of prickly water.)
It is possible that your shades aren't the same pair that have the AR hooked to
them, but it’s been awhile since you’ve used those shades. Why were you left
here with them? Does this mean that the AR might still be out there somewhere?
No. It wouldn’t make sense for it to be anywhere but with you. The AR, like
Sawtooth and Squarewave and Cal and all of your belongings, is gone.
Then again, nothing about this situation “makes sense.” Yes, why would your
things and your family be anywhere but with you, but why would you be anywhere
but with them in the first place? Much less approximately four hundred years in
the past?
Any reasoning you get even the loosest grasp on crumbles away, leaving you
empty-headed and dizzy. For a moment you think that might be the result of the
steam, but when you come back to yourself to check you notice that the water
isn’t even hot.
You frown.
It could only have been a little over ten minutes since you turned the water
on. Has it been longer? It couldn't have been. And you were sure the water was
at least warm when you stepped under it. You distinctly remember thinking that
it must have just been heating up.
Regardless of what may or may not have happened, the knob is twisted all the
way to “hot” and only manages to be lukewarm at best. Though the “warmth” you
feel may be more attributed to the tingly sting of the water sharply pounding
away at your skin. Shivering, you reach for the body wash with plans to quickly
wash yourself and get out. If the water isn't hot, the allure of moving your
self-pitying to the shower is entirely gone.
 
===============================================================================
 
It’s only after you finally get out of the shower that you remember that none
of your hair care or skin care things are here. In addition to a frankly
dissatisfying shower, you now had to deal with the upheaval of your routine
too. In comparison to your situation as a whole the issue seems laughable, but…
Itwas one of the only things holding you together. One more thing pried from
your grip that you adopted and nurtured as an absolute necessity back home.
To think that you stepped into the shower to ease yourself in the first place,
and now it’s only part of another break down. You don’t cry - (fuck, you’ll
avoid doing that again as long as you possibly can) - but your hands clench
tight in your wet, inappropriately wavy hair and for a long span of minutes you
have to just stand still and breathe to steady your heart.
In spite of your better judgement, you conduct a short search of the medicine
cabinet and the box beneath the sink to look for anything that might resemble
your usual products, finding only a gel that you used as the base for what
ultimately turned into your everyday product. Without the rest of the
ingredients, though, it was utter garbage.
Even your most vain physical comforts were shot. This place - whatever the fuck
it was, however the fuck you got here - was pressuring you further and further
into the depths of typical, disgusting depression.
A haste takes over your shaking hands as you pull your shirt from the sink, but
the second you turn it over to put it on you notice the various streaks of dirt
and grime across the fabric. Wrinkling your nose in disgust, you drop it on the
floor and reach for your underwear and your sweatpants. Your pants are in a
similar if not worse state, and in the end all you can deem verging on
acceptable are your underwear. Which are at least a day old.
You ball up the whole set into a tight wad and push yourself out of the cramped
bathroom, breathing in short huffs as you quickly toe down the hallway to the
unblocked, typically never used door to your bedroom. This time you’re more
unsettled by your adjustment to nothing looking like it should, and ignore the
bare room in favor of an empty hamper and a set of drawers. Your clothes are
tossed into the basket and you start tugging open the drawers to look through
them.
Thankfully you’re met with men’s clothes, and while that isn’t much it is a
small relief as you root through the drawers for a pair of boxers. The first
pair you find are a plain, faded grey-blue and the material is worn and soft.
You bring them to your face first and foremost to tentatively inhale the scent
that clings to them, thankfully breathing in nothing more than a dusty scent
underlaid by the old lingerings of laundry soap. You pull the pair on hastily
before starting to root through the drawers for more clothes.
 
===============================================================================
 
About an hour after you settle back into the futon among knitted and microfiber
blankets in found loose pajama pants and a shirt more roomy than you’re used
to, you realize that you’re hungry. Another hour, then two, tick by before you
decide to do anything about it, instead you stay nestled in the blankets
watching the clouds outside the window. Eventually, after it’s grown fully dark
and the clouds blend too well into the dark sky, the gnawing at your stomach
drives you upright and into the kitchen. With one hand you pull open the fridge
and with the other you push and pull at your naturally crimped hair, soft but
fluffed into an unorganized poof. As your stomach begs for a meal, your mind is
overly focused on the need for a straightener and flat-iron primer.
The fridge is empty. You already knew that, but you’re only reminded after you
open the door and get a look. The hand in your hair pauses and drops as you
step back from the open fridge and peer into it with a disgusted curl of your
lip. You remember, too, why you hadn’t looked into the rest of the kitchen
after seeing these grime-caked, sticky shelves.
It almost puts off your appetite entirely, and you make a note to clean those
later when you close the fridge door. Against your better judgement you
investigate the cupboards, thoughts put on pause as you drag the wooden, dingy
door open and peer in. Nothing unexpected springs out at you, and as you slowly
open the chipped wooden door further you’re relieved to find that you aren’t
met with anything more offensive than dust and the stale scent of a long
untouched space. However, the cupboard is only just shy of bare. One half-
packed and half-rolled red paper bag sits in the back corner below some
cobwebs, and eight cans of chicken noodle soup are lined up against the back of
the cupboard beside it. Some packets of powdered gravy (probably “just add
water” shit, you assume without looking at the packaging too closely) litter
the nearer center of the cupboard, along with three packs of “top ramen” and a
single tin of table salt toppled onto its side.
Needless to say: your options are limited and unappetizing.
It’s little more than a chore as you reach into the cupboard and grab one of
those cans of soup, setting it on the counter and closing the door on
everything you left behind.
 
===============================================================================
 
TT: Dude!
TT: Where you at, man.
TT: Wait.
TT: Which computer are you using?
TT: I'm not comfortable knowing my words could be hovering over Cage's
clownish, sort of gaunt face.
TT: Could you maybe switch back to naked blue chicks as your exclusive desktop
fodder? TIA.
TT: But yeah.
TT: I don't know if you just want a little solitude.
TT: Or if maybe you finally just got like,
TT: A case of Strider fatigue.
TT: I could understand that.
TT: I mean, not to get all neurotic on you.
TT: I'm just saying I get it, if that's what's going on.
TT: But for real, if you gotta sneak away for a few days, that's cool.
TT: Just might be kind of dope if you at least would let me know which planet
you scurried off to.
TT: And by dope I guess I mean considerate?
TT: Really not trying to be a drag here.
TT: Wondering what's up is all.
TT: Want to meet up soon?
TT: I found a really promising tomb we could raid.
TT: Looks like it runs hella deep.
TT: If I've got the specs right, could run as deep as the Lion's Mouth itself.
TT: But without all the fuckin' fire to deal with.
TT: Wait, I mean Lion's_Mouth.
TT: Gotta underline that key shit. Always forget.
TT: Figure it should take a couple days to make it to the bottom.
TT: Only a day if we both go limp and just fall the whole way down the stairs.
TT: Ignoring literally every sage warning we've ever received about those
treacherous plummetation zigzags.
TT: Just tumbling on down in a floppy limbed trance like a couple of puppets in
a race arranged by some drunk gamblers.
TT: If you're into another expedition, head to LOTAK and hit me up. Just don't
forget your mask this time.
TT: The deeper we go, the worse it gets, remember?
TT: Could be some unreal grist down there.
TT: More puzzle shit.
TT: Loads of skeletons.
TT: Pack your guns dog.
For longer than strictly necessary you stare at the chatbox and turn over in
your mind the words that you’d already thought-typed, eyes locked on your last
words, breath baited, waiting despite yourself for any response. Minutes tick
by with your metaphorical thumbs poised for response, anxiety swelling up in
your chest until everything inside feels like it’s crushed up against the walls
of your muscles and ribs. Every time that you consider closing the window, you
bargain for a few more seconds.
TT: It seems that Jake English is just not that into you anymore.
The ping of a message in another window startles you, but by the time you open
the chat window you’re already expecting your own voice to echo back in your
face. Distorted. Electronic. Something that the AR gave himself, rather than
you giving it to him. Samples of your voice taken over time, you theorize,
woven together several times over to construct a proper bank for the responder
to pull from and vocalize. As soon as you open the window he speaks again, as
if he were waiting for your full attention to resume his train of thought.
TT: We both know that I fuck with you a lot, bro, but let me be the first to
make you well informed that I am not yanking your chain this time around.
TT: This is a long overdue convo we’re having right now.
TT: Am I supposed to believe that you only have good intentions just because
you said so, man?
TT: No, you're supposed to believe I’m being nothing but real with you because
all the evidence is right in your other tab.
TT: He hasn't responded yet because he has no intention of responding to you.
You spend a minute at the very least staring at your chat window with AR.
TT: Bro?
You tab out and switch over to the chat that you kept open with Jake, closing
the window before tabbing back to your conversation with your responder.
TT: So I’m in for a lecture over my clingy, desperate bullshit.
TT: I didn't say that.
TT: This particular jam is more in the interests of giving you someone to talk
to about Jake’s unbelievable shit right now.
TT: Call it a periodical evaluation of the exact doki value of this “kiss kiss
fall in love.”
TT: It seems as though you don’t have a whole lot of options for chat partners
and a dire need for someone to confirm for you that no, the Jake English
experience is not exactly as cool as we all dreamt up at five in the morning.
TT: I could talk to Jane and Roxy about it.
TT: It would be shitty, considering how awkward it is between Jane and I right
now.
TT: I’m sure that she doesn’t want to hear about it, but I could talk to Roxy.
TT: But you won’t. What’s the harm in talking to me?
TT: You’re probably just about the most harmful person to talk to.
TT: Regardless, I’m not so sure it’s the Jake English experience that’s
underwhelming.
TT: You mean that you think you haven't been a wild ride? That he’s gotten sick
of you?
TT: I’m not going to lie to you, bro, it’s looking incredibly likely that this
is true.
TT: Be that as it may though it’s still righteously fucking uncool of him to
just ditch you like this.
TT: It’s one thing if he stopped liking you, and it’s another if he doesn't
want to hang out with you anymore
TT: (Which, by the way, is a lame crock of shit because you are catering to
everything that he advertised as his schtick and he has not given you any
reason to think that he shouldn't be having a blast right now,)
TT: but for him to drop you like this without even fucking talking to you about
it?
TT: That’s some poor ass shit, dude.
Hal definitely has a point. Beforehand you were mostly down on yourself and it
didn’t even really occur to you that Jake was being an asshole. Yeah, he was
kind of being inconsiderate, but now that you think about it...
TT: It is kinda inconsiderate. Considering how not only I grew up, but how both
of us grew up, this abandonment shit is pretty fucking uncool.
Wait a second - Hal? Did you just accidentally name your auto responder? His
response catches you out of your thoughts before they can drag further.
TT: It is absolutely inconsiderate. Outrageously uncool. The absolutivity of
his inconsideration is as definite as the value: |Inconsiderate.|
TT: Even if you try to put a negative in that shit it’s still coming out
exactly the way it is.
TT: I don’t think Jake thinks about that kind of shit. Even in relation to
himself.
TT: Because Jake English won’t face the music.
TT: He won’t man up and talk to you about it. He won’t even properly
acknowledge your feelings.
TT: Are we even sure that he understands that you have them? Or does he just
see you as another robot?
TT: That would only be under the typical assumption of what a robot is. You
have emotions. Sawtooth and Squarewave have emotions.
TT: It seems that you're unaware that Jake English considers me to be little
more than a fancy answering machine and has only been exposed personally to
your creations in the terms of robots.
TT: The era that he comes from would in fact adopt the typical assumptions
about robotics capabilities.
TT: … You have a fair point.
The “ping” of a separate chat window startles you.
TT: Hold that thought.
TT: I got another message.
TT: It seems that you have forgotten I am still your auto responder. All your
calls go through me first, Dirk. The probability of you having another message
at this point in time is ridiculously low.
You minimize the tab that your auto responder is talking to you in and discover
that your new message is from Jake. The notification sends a jolt through you
and you set your second pair of shades aside just as you open the window. The
heightened feelings from your most recent conversation nearly evaporate
entirely on sight.
When you look up, the foggy green horizon is replaced by the ocean. Cool waves
lap at the sandy shores and the early morning sun is just coming up, peeking
over the horizon that you’re facing. The light is faint, but still too much
against your suddenly bare eyes.
“Dirk?” Disoriented, you turn to look toward the voice. Jake stares back at
you, awestruck, dirty, hair rumpled and caked with sweat and dirt. Heavy bags
hang under his eyes. He’s looks like a mess, but he’s beautiful. He looks
excited to see you. More excited than you expected. Wasn't he just avoiding
you?
“Jake?” Emotions swirl in you uncontrollably, tossing your insides around and
making you feel dizzy and sick. “Where are we?” The voice that squeaks out of
you is so unsure and unfamiliar to you. Simultaneously you’re raw and
vulnerable from being ignored, (angry, a little angry,) and overjoyed to see
him. Apparently he feels the same, because he immediately envelopes you in a
tight hug.
It’s briefly uncomfortable, to be touched so suddenly when you’ve never been
touched before, but less so because… you can barely feel it. You feel a faint
warmth from his body and the slightest dampness of sweat off his skin and
through his shirt - but it all feels like he’s touching you through a barrier.
Muffled. You can feel the beat of his heart against your chest, but it’s a
blurry feeling like a tickle you can barely feel. A featherlight touch of
fingers through the cushion of a blanket when you're barely awake.
“Dirk?” he noticed that you’re not responding and he’s already pulling away
guiltily before you push forward to hug him back. It’s awkward now. He pats
your back. No doubt you seem far too desperate now that you cling to him with a
hard pressure in your arms. “Are you alright? Where - where are you? Are you
with Roxy? Jane and I - we’ve been trying to get a hold of you but pesterchum…
the two of you are just gone. It says you just up and don’t exist! ”
What does he mean where are you? “I’m- right here.” He frowns at you, pulling
out of your vice grip so easily and sitting back on the rock that the two of
you are resting on as you watch the sunrise. Two worn guns sit at his right hip
and his phone is beside them. At the foot of the rock is a heavy bag, not quite
zipped all the way up, overstuffed.
“No, Dirk. I mean… the real you.”
Jake looks bigger. Broader than you remember and taller. His jaw and his lip
are covered in stubble, though in places it’s a little patchy, and the slight
baby fat you remember on his cheeks is just gone . You remember him from video
calls that seem like just yesterday, but simultaneously seem like they were
years and years ago. His face was more boyish, then, but now… now he looks like
a man. His eyes back then were bright and full of emotion but they had
something about them that suggested naiveté, optimism through some kind of
unfocus.
He’s still bright-eyed and his eyes still bare more emotion than you could even
fathom feeling, but his gaze is so sharp and real, piercing, … understanding
even through his confusion.
“The real me?” Despite yourself you stutter those words, remnants of a ragged,
long-haired child sitting in front of the big screen television mimicking
words. Your mind is still swimming in Jake’s appearance. Not because he’s
attractive, but because it… seems like he’s changed so much.
Jake looks frustrated, but suddenly resigned. “I suppose you wouldn't know,
would you? All you know is what I know. But for you to exist… the real you must
exist, too, right?”
The real you? That’s the second time that he’s said that, now. Are you not
real..? You look down at your hands. You were just wearing gloves, but now your
palms are bare and your legs and feet are, too. Your toes touch the sand, but
you can’t feel it.
“He must, mustn’t he? I wouldn’t imagine you like this.” Like this? “You look
like a mess.” Oh. “I mean - no offense intended of course! You really don’t
look bad with your hair unstyled and all I’ve never thought that you did but -
I know that was a thing for him. Or, you. Both of you. But you look… tired.”
That last word is sighed, pitiful.
You lift a hand to your hair to comb through the wispy, tangled curls. They’re
still soft, but… matted. You can feel your cheeks heat up, but only as much as
you could feel Jake’s sweat dampening your shirt. Your shirt that isn’t yours,
borrowed from the apartment you stole away into.
“I… am.”
Jake doesn’t think that you’re real and you’re beginning to believe him when he
scoots closer to you. You watch him struggle with the decision to touch you but
you don’t call him out on his hesitation when he finally wraps his arms around
you again. This time it’s not so hard to reciprocate.
“Where are you…” he whispers, his words murmured into your mess of hair and
ghosting across your ear like salty ocean breeze. You’re still confused, but
you’re lucid enough to realize that he isn’t talking to you. You tell yourself
that it’s inappropriate to respond, when really you just can’t come up with any
words and instead comfort him with your loose hug as you look out to the ocean.
In the distance you see a small plane approaching, the sound of it growing
louder as it begins to descend. By the time that it reaches the beach Jake has
pulled away from you and is grabbing up his overstuffed backpack from the foot
of the rock, then another that you hadn’t seen behind it. He looks back at you.
 
===============================================================================
 
 
The sun is high in the sky, barely blocked out by the crooked blinds pulled
down over the window adjacent to your borrowed bed. The cracked clock on the
wall says that it’s already past one in the afternoon.
Sitting up, you choke and cough on the dusty air of the room, narrowing your
eyes to a squint and then shut at the sting of a headache behind your eyes.
Slumping over, you try to remember your dreams.
Last you remember you were with Jake, hugging him, a plane was landing on the
shore of the beach the two of you were sitting on… or… next to. He was talking
to you, asking you something. He was warm and damp and he smelled like the
ocean and something else entirely.
You dreamed before that, too, right? Or was that the same dream? He was
ignoring you, you were alone… you remember red, orange, and green.
Swinging your legs over the edge of the bed, you comb your fingers through your
hair and slide on your shades before stumbling out of the room to follow the
ache of your stomach.
Chapter End Notes
     Oh look, another chapter after... more than two months. Yikes. I've
     been doing a lot of roleplaying and that's been clogging up my time,
     additionally dealing with my ex moving out of my house and a lot of
     other shit. It's been a hard time! Hopefully I'll update this MORE
     regularly, but because I know myself I'm going to have to say that it
     probably won't be once a week. We're looking at probably, at best,
     once every two weeks if not once a month. Which I know is a
     deterrent, but this is my first real attempt at fic-writing and it's
     a little more trying than I anticipated. Anyway: for more consistent
     updates on events catch me @ kurbinoblacksheep.tumblr.com
Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed
their work!