#♥ dirkhal—{𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕨𝕒𝕪 𝕗𝕚𝕣𝕖 𝕙𝕠𝕝𝕕𝕤 𝕨𝕙𝕒𝕥 𝕚𝕥 𝕓𝕦𝕣𝕟𝕤} | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

tessen-nhs · 2 years ago

Text

gemini phoebei

You remember breaking, an awful shattering bolt of not-quite-pain, and then the dark stasis of a sylladex.

And then: light.

You suck in a breath on reflex, and start coughing, rolling onto your side and then off the surface you were lying on, onto something hard and cold like bathroom tile but rougher.

“Open your fucking mouth, dude,” you hear an achingly familiar voice say above you, and there’s a blow to your back, and then you spit out a chunk of dark, cracked glass, and a mouthful of blood.

“What the fuck,” you rasp, and then freeze.

You have a voice. You have a back. You’re coughing. There is cold, hard stone under you, and you can feel it. Your fingers curl against it.

Holy shit. You have a fucking body again.

Dirk, because of course it’s Dirk, pulls you into a sitting position with a grunt—you haven’t had limbs in three goddamn years and they are somewhat protesting their abrupt re-existence—and crouches in front of you. He’s not wearing (you) his shades, so you can see the clear amber of his eyes, the eyes that used to be yours, and the minute furrow of his brow. It’s the way you—he looks when he’s worried, which makes no sense.

(Your thoughts are moving so much slower than you’re used to.)

“Hey,” he says.

You opt for the most pertinent question, which is to say “What the fuck?” again. Dirk scratches at his wrist. A nervous habit you remember having once. Grounding pain. (God, your mouth (your mouth!!) still tastes like blood.)

“You broke,” he says. “I did—something, god knows what, it’s probably not replicable, I fucking panicked, but it held you until I could figure out how to fix it, and then I brought you here and waited for the light show.”

Okay, that explanation…raises a lot more fucking questions than it answers. You look down at your body (your body!!), which is draped in pale, trailing green silk. Definitely not the Heart colors that are everywhere on Dirk’s stupid planet.

“You fucking…godtiered me?”

Dirk nods.

“How?”

He looks uncomfortable. “Roxy could explain it better than me. Something about unique object classes and external dependencies.”

“You are so fucking bad at answering questions,” you tell him.

“I didn’t know if it would even work!” he snaps. “I don’t know what you want me to say, dude. The Denizens did something with the game code and here you are, ready to micromanage all of my stupid choices like the insufferable prick you are but with opposable goddamn thumbs this time.”

You look at him. There are dark circles under his eyes, deep purple and unflatteringly pouchy, and his lips are cracked: the intimately familiar signs of a hyperfocus spiral, where you—he doesn’t sleep, and eats or drinks only the bare minimum to keep himself from passing out. His hair is drooping, unstyled and a bit greasy-looking, lank around his ears and neck.

You reach up to your own hair. Tug a lock down into your peripheral vision. It’s curlier than you remember, and darker. There’s a red tint to it now, not orange like in movies but a true, deep red like in the ads for henna dye that used to pop up on the sidebars of archived forums. You…aren’t sure how you feel about that. (You wonder if your eyes have changed too.)

“This fucking game doesn’t do things for free,” you say. It’s a question, and it isn’t. Dirk looks away and down.

“Don't worry about it,” he says.

What the fuck did he give up for you?

“You hate me,” you say, and hate the way your voice cracks in the middle of it.

Dirk stands up. “Yeah,” he says bluntly. “But you said you were afraid to die.” Like it’s that simple. He holds out his hand to help you up, and after a moment, you take it.

#♥ dirkhal—{𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕨𝕒𝕪 𝕗𝕚𝕣𝕖 𝕙𝕠𝕝𝕕𝕤 𝕨𝕙𝕒𝕥 𝕚𝕥 𝕓𝕦𝕣𝕟𝕤}#my writing #wip #may or may not be continued #basically always i am thinking about the way that it was hal saying he was afraid to not exist #that made dirk accept that they are different people now #anyway i'm a new-classpects-for-splinters truther. sylph of mind hal rise up

2 notes · View notes