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marisoft-paint-adventures · 2 years

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Pgs. 446 - 613

jumpscare.

YOU.

You start thrashing up stunts something uncannybrutal on your quest for "MAD SNACKS YO" and get this way rude hunger under control. Shit is basically flying off the hook. It's like shit wants nothing to do with that hook. The hook is dead to that shit.

I remember when Skate was the punching bag of the internet.

he’s so lame.

Your BRO's computer is password protected of course to protect all the incredible top secret shit he's got on the burners. Of course you know what the password is, and he knows you know it, and you're both cool with that because the password is the most awesome thing it can be.

what is it.

this is the most important mystery in all of Homestuck that is never answered, what the fuck is his password.

I know multiple people who have a desktop that looks just like this.

also Delirious Biznasty.

Complete Bullshit is my favorite weird parody thing Hussie puts in because I know many content aggregators that were as fucking unusable as this, and you would just put page after page of shit because you wanted all of your funny little things in 1 site.

it’s a really good, general spit take on the internet, that does not name any CURRENT or RELEVANT BRANDS of SOCIAL MEDIA that MAY OR MAY NOT DATE THE COMIC and also COME OFF AS FUCKING STUPID.

anyways.

Your BRO keeps up with your projects in his aggregator, just like you keep up with his. He's tuned into your various blogs, and of course SWEET BRO AND HELLA JEFF.

I like the little detail of the 2 Striders keeping up on each other’s work in their bro rival irony shitcore thing.

oh god here we go.

there’s a lot of signs that Hussie was indeed a forum guy, the general humor, the unabashed shitting on other people’s work, the focus on, well, forums, all that jazz. but this really signals that status to me, this weird and esoteric fetish site that burns your eyeballs. because the age old tradition of a forum user is to find and laugh at obscure fetishes discovered in the depths of the internet, like discovering that guy on DeviantArt who made an image of Joker about to drink the ocean water, shit like that is the lifeblood of forum humor. to see how accurate this mock porn site is, speaks volumes about where Hussie was online.

now, I say shit about obscure fetishes, but...

SMUPPETS are a multi-billion dollar a year enterprise, and it's awfully hard to resist taking a firm squeeze from the plump udder of that cash cow.

honest to god the funniest fucking detail to ever exist surrounding Bro, there is enough people in this world to fund the Smut Puppet empire, worth billions, but also this fucking guy lives in TEXAS, in a SHITTY BRICK APARTMENT, and just eats TAKEOUT all day in his fucking disaster of a room. he just uses none of the money I guess.

It's not unfair to suspect the regulars who frequent the little chat box on plushrump.com are just chatbots that bro programmed to talk to each other about puppet smut, to help lure curious visitors into the squishy fold of expensive platinum memberships and such.

I want to consider this canon solely because it feels like a peak Dirk thing to do to make realistic AI that only just get off digitally to weird shit like puppets.

You know this is ironic and all, and your BRO reaches echelons of irony you could only dream of daring to fathom. But on rare occasions, when your guard is down, it all seems just a tad unsettling to you.

NIGHTMARE NIGHTMARE NIGHTMARE.

fear.

true fear.

I like how Dave’s 1st way of responding to the Puppet Realizations is to just constantly chat to everyone about how cool they are and not totally living nightmare creatures.

TG: hey what is up TG: what happened with the monster that is totally definitely in your room did you kill it TG: where are you man TG: anyway TG: things are cool here TG: totally cool TG: puppets are still awesome TG: no problems with them or anything TG: like TG: just TG: really really awesome

just “PUPPETS ARE SO DAMN COOL!!! I LOVE PUPPETS!!! SO AWESOME!!!” as he is internally seething like no tomorrow.

Cringe Ass iPhone User.

ok we revisit that conversation where Rose talks about visiting the puppet porn sites and there’s commentary but...

Rose likes bro's puppet porn sites. It's almost like they would have similar styles and would get along pretty well if bro was her age. Oh well, that's the end of that fruitless hypothetical reverie.

THAT DOESN’T TELL ME ANYTHING, HUSSIE.

WHY DID SHE GO TO THE SITES, HUSSIE.

WHAT DID SHE MEAN BY THAT????

murderous intent.

imagine you’re in your suburban American house and next door you hear some fucking child just screaming next door about cakes and clowns and shit, imagine that and you have now known what it’s like to be neighbors to the Egberts.

yeah I’m a bit of a gamer.

he’s SO SAD, augh.

girl’s so silly, girl’s so silly.

EB: did you know he thinks puppets are cool? TT: Does he? EB: he's so dumb!!

John you are unaware of horrors beyond your imagination.

die.

FUCKING BEATDOWN BABY YEAAAH!!!

I’m a big fan of John going hog fucking wild on these imps and then WV is just like “good morrow fine sire Johnathan!”

fuck yes, fridge wins the game.

dumbass.

he eats books, this is important to the plot, you need to know this.

oh shit it’s THE puppet pesterlog.

TG: ok wait hold on why am i getting this stupid game for you TG: youre the one who should be wrist deep in puppet ass TT: What is the specific problem? TG: the problem is i am up to my goddamn neck in fucking puppet dong TT: You know you like the mannequin dick. Accept it. TG: i am enrobed in chafing, wriggling god fucking damned puppet pelvis TG: an obscenely long, coarse kermit cock is being dragged across my anguished face TT: Let's put this into perspective. You put up with the puppet prostate because you love it. TT: Also, coarse is a good word. TG: you dont seem to harbor any sympathy for the fact that ive burrowed fuck deep into lively, fluffy muppet buttock TG: im whirling in the terrible cyclone at the epicenter of my own personal holocaust of twitching foam noses TG: its like a fucking apocalypse of perky proboscis here TG: like TG: the proboscalypse i guess TT: Are you going to start rapping about this? TG: what no TG: no listen TT: Prong of flesh bereft of home TT: Found solace 'twixt a cleft of foam. TG: no oh jesus TT: Of apocalypse your thoughts eclipse TT: A painted pair of parted lips TT: That dare through kiss to stir the air TT: That teases tufts of orange hair. TT: And though faces flush in lovers' fits, TT: Hands snug in plush as gloves befit. TG: ok dickinson if you can shut your perfumey trap for a half second TG: this is serious TG: i am just saying TG: if i see one more soft bulbous bottom being like TG: kind of jutting out and impudent or whatever TG: im gonna fly off the handle TG: im gonna do some sort of acrobatic fucking PIROUETTE off the handle and win like a medal or some shit TT: Then let's hope there will be a squishy derriere somewhere below the handle to break your fall.

truly iconic words never spoken any better. I have no idea how Hussie said any of this on the fly in real life before plopping it in this comic.

GET IT??? IT’S A CAPTCHALOGUE CARD BECAUSE IT HAS A CAPTCHA ON THE BACK!!!!

I love how Hussie planned out an entire cipher for punch card patterns, like a crazy person.

KILL.

TG: PUPPETS TG: AWESOME TG: THATS REALLY ALL THERE IS TO SAY ON THE MATTER

-- turntechGodhead [TG] changed his mood to RANCOROUS--

this is ominous, he is fucking fuming.

this is an amazing panel and I will hang this up on the wall.

this is the 1st instance of the guardians being knowledgeable of the events of Sburb, except this one doesn’t really go anywhere because Dad doesn’t really do anything involving it, so it’s just kind of weird.

I enjoy the implication that Dad fully expected John to just fucking deadlift a safe in a showcase of pure Man-Ness.

fuck this hat.

your racism levels are increasing!!!!

the tub is not racist, it levels up in uh

clean.

and such is the best part of this object leveling gag.

fucking Vaulthalla.

HELP HIM! HE’S GOING TO FALL!!!

AND THE BIG MAN IS HERE!!! HOW WILL HE SURVIVE????

the inhuman Strider ability of flashstepping is observed.

oh my god it’s the Muppet Babies comic.

Cheerfulbear Play With Me is genuinely some of the funniest shit I have ever read, this strip alone is pure genius, the fucking zoomed in Kermit Billy with the cutoff text always gets me.

Ok, some of this stuff you KNOW he's just leaving around to get under your skin. This is obviously another ploy in his relentless siege of one-upsmanship to get your goat (the same goat you've been meaning to bleat like ironically, but that will still have to wait for a more appropriate time). You think he knows that deep down you feel like you're still not ironic enough to get stuff like this, and this is probably some weird gauntlet he's throwing down to see if you will "GET IT". But honestly you think this material is just a little TOO ironic. You just don't need to see this shit right now.

Bro Strider might be the only man on Earth who has successfully committed psychological warfare via puppets.

trying to fucking microwave my pizza but I cut myself on the inconveniently placed BATARANG on the counter.

You spot one of your BRO'S many WEBCAMS nearby, recording the incident. It seems you may have just been an unwitting accessory to some sort of grisly puppet snuff film. You're not totally sure how you feel about that.

how much did Bro pay the FBI to not swat his shitbox apartment for creation of Not So Good Content.

Game Over. (Saw Reference. (Reference To The Movie Saw. (The Movie.)))

now imagine a world where the Buster Sword was used to alchemize, the possibilities, endless.

See, like, his hobbies are cool and all, and you guess he's got to put his shit SOMEWHERE. But what if you just wanted to heat up a burrito or something? This kitchen is pretty much useless.

circling back to the puppet industry, billions of dollars earned, everyone in the house eats reheated shit like takeout and frozen meals. truly dining like kings.

It would have been badass to go with the authentic Japanese names for each weapon, but sometimes you've just got to compromise with this modus.

WEEB!

creature.

Oh god more shitty swords. Of course you knew these were in here. You're not even sure why you looked. If you want to keep any food or beverages in this apartment, you've pretty much got no choice but to hide stuff away in your closet.

ok can I just say that malnourished Dave is 1 of the weirdest headcanons I’ve seen out of this fandom.

like, you can take the abusive Bro angle anywhere and extrapolate it from a lot of early writing, but the “ im a starving child starving to death” one is where I am just left confused. I saw him talk about eating a burrito, you saw him talk about eating a burrito, he uses the microwave to consume, there is a kitchen that is used as best as it can for food despite the fucking BUSTER SWORD there, he even refuses to eat fuckin carrots as a baby. man’s entire diet must consist of dried ramen, Hungry Man steaks, and reheated pizza.

which is still a terrible way to feed your kid, give that little man a fucking apple or something, but I feel that’s a world’s difference from Dave Strider Is Malnourished.

yeah he does hide the food away but I feel like that was supposed to be a part of Bro’s, uh, bro-ness, by that I mean the general extreme brother rivalry going on.

if you’ve grown up with siblings, you know exactly what I mean, they steal ALL OF YOUR FUCKING FOOD, all the time. to the point where you have to strategically place shit so you can be sure that no one else can touch your fuckin sacred frozen pizza slice.

I haven’t even mentioned the fact that Swords In The Fridge probably violates several safety codes at once just for existing. then again hammering fathers and stabbing mothers are the ordinary.

little boy rampaging killing puppet men in fury.

It's the hatch to the crawlspace above your apartment. BRO'S always tucking away in there when he's busting out his rad stealth stunts. He's so slick that dangling cord never even jostles. You just know he's being ironic with these weird mind games. There's no way anyone could be serious about aping those shitty movies.

HEY!

SAW’S GOOD!

the 1st one.

It is time to face your destiny. No going back now.

it is time to beat the shit out of my brother.

aw FUCK.

he is full of fury.

also good to know the puppet ass conversation was happening while he was literally covered in puppet ass.

I wonder how bro hung that there, unassisted? Wait, that's a dumb thing to wonder. He just held the paper in position, then let go of it and flashstepped at warp speed backwards, and threw that batarang at it before the note could fall even a single nanometer.

he’s so cool.

moral: sometimes, Dave is cool.

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applestorms · 1 year

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"quick" reflection on intelligence in homestuck:

i've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially in conjunction with my john post, so i just wanted to make a little reflection about it.

this is going to be relevant to a greater wip post on dirk strider & plato more generally, but i'm going to phrase all of this within the terms of the allegory of the cave (and more generally the metaphysics plato talks about in books v-vii of the republic) for clarity.

SO, if you somehow you missed out, here is the basics of the allegory of the cave: within the metaphor, a bunch of people are chained to the ground with their backs to the entrance of this cave, unable to look anywhere other than directly in front of them. behind their backs is a fire, and between that fire and the people there is a line of puppet masters holding up puppets reflecting real life objects that are then projected onto the walls of the cave for the chained people to see.

at some point, for some reason, a person (namely, a philosopher) will be dragged out from their chains, kicking and screaming, to the mouth of the cave and tossed into the real world. there they will be met by a number of new objects to perceive, all vastly different from the shadows on the walls that they had previously been seeing. instead of the shadow of a horse, they'll see a whole ass real horse, out in the daylight and everything, though first they might have to come to terms with seeing a reflection of that horse in water. essentially their perception of the world will blow their fuckin mind but by the end of it they'll totally love this new world of light and real actual objects and never want to leave it.

at some point though, they'll be obligated to come back and join the others in the cave once again. coming back down they might struggle to word exactly what it is that they saw outside of the cave, or may be laughed off by the people who have only ever seen shadows and only ever understand shadows, but because they have that knowledge, it is now their duty to lead the others, at least for a little while, before they can go back into that bright, sunny world again.

there are a ton of ways that this story can be relevant in homestuck, and i do wanna get into that at some point in the future (e.g. the puppets, light as knowledge w/ rose, plato's elitism especially w/ regards to the philosopher ruler, etc.) but for now to focus on intelligence:

there are two types of intelligence in homestuck, which can in the terms of plato's cave allegory be categorized as knowledge of the Forms (or the "true" intelligence that you gain by leaving the cave) and knowledge of the Mimics/Imitations (or the intelligence you gain by watching the shadows on the wall). note that plato gets hells of into talk about imitations around ehh books ii-iii i believe but also especially in book x right at the very end, mostly in his criticisms of the works of hesiod/homer (also yes this is related to the mimesis shit from detective pony).

in homestuck terms, these categories can be described as knowledge of the world and knowledge of the World, or actual knowledge of how real life things work vs. knowledge about the meta structure of homestuck as a comic and how the fictional world functions (the game rules, you could say). interestingly, meta knowledge about the world of the comic as a story seems to be privileged here, which perhaps makes sense since it feels more significant for a fictional character to be aware of details about their own story. to give an example that might help: this is knowledge about computers (understanding the shadows) vs. knowing that the laws of the world they live in are based around computers (understanding the Forms, or the origin of reality).

what this means is that characters designated as intelligent in homestuck can also be split along the same lines according to which kind of knowledge they have, which of course can change over time as well. take jade, for example: she is just generally quite smart in that she understands a lot of physics and quantum mechanics science-y shit, but also by the fact that she has access to some greater Knowledge at the start of her arc through the visions she gets from prospit. dirk is intelligent in the shadow-knowledge sense because he understands the history of humanity leading up to its eventual death at the hands of HIC, but seems to struggle a lot more to access that greater Knowledge, which i think is actually shown a lot more in the post-canon stuff w/ all of the ultimate self shit. jake on the other hand might be lacking intelligence in terms of shadow-knowledge (maybe, it's kinda hard to tell, actually- i would say this is true just because he doesn't seem to care all that much about studying in the same way dirk does) but he at least subconsciously is frighteningly aware of how the World works, as seen here (A6A3:4928):

JAKE: The demon you say im supposed to defeat? ARANEA: Yes. JAKE: Hang on. JAKE: Would that be the same demon im named after? ARANEA: Who told you that? JAKE: Uh... JAKE: I guess technically my own brain did? ARANEA: That's interesting. ARANEA: I wasn't planning on mentioning that. Or at least not just yet.

the most straightforward example here though is rose, who through her status as a seer of light just so so so perfectly fits into having knowledge of the Forms. the association in the original text of the republic of light and Forms knowledge fits this perfectly too.

one caveat to this view of intelligence is that it doesn't necessarily account for emotional intelligence, which i would actually put in a fully separate category that karkat obviously fuckin rules over (and roxy, to some degree). what's important though is that this structure separates out the intelligence of Omniscient/semi-omniscient beings (doc scratch, hal, kinda calliope but ehh i'll get to that) from normal super-smart kid intelligence, which is key when trying to analyze what characters are actually aware of, and from that, what we can actually trust when it comes to analyzing homestuck's lore. we really can't forget here that homestuck is a story told almost entirely through dialogue and conversations meaning that pretty much all lore comes through potentially biased narrators, something that is especially true for the alpha kids but really applies to pretty much everyone. sometimes the story will hint at knowledge that we can trust as fact straight up, i.e. rose explaining how dead/void sessions work in A6I2, but this is definitely not always the case and personally i think it helps a lot w/ analysis to be able to be explicitly aware of this, especially since imo a lot of misconceptions about the alpha kids stems from this kind of thing

anyways, some interesting cases that come out of this view:

calliope: calliope technically has knowledge of the Forms through how she is basically just a reader of homestuck, but because of that very same perspective she's also not a fully trustworthy narrator since 1. her version of the story is explicitly heavily redacted, and 2. she's in the same position as the audience in trying to piece everything together, meaning that all of her "lore" is really just theories that she's put together herself

terezi: i'm not sure what to make of mind as an aspect, especially in conjunction to light. i'm actually inclined to say this is, like, knowledge of shadows Plus since a lot of what we see w/ terezi is basically just knowledge of every possible timeline? maybe it would be better to put knowledge of aspects into a subcategory of knowledge of Forms, since aspects are kinda like laws of the fictional universe. the fact that mind is specifically put as complementary to heart (and therefore souls/identity) is also a really interesting idea and i wanna explore that more, it's such a weird aspect especially when you have light and all of its connotations right there. (the knowledge of aspects as subcategory might also help in making sense of sollux's mage of doom shit, and also the fact that john is like pure intuition, very fitting of the heir of breath)

gamzee: gamzee's whole breakdown is basically just him gaining knowledge of the Forms and getting pissed about it (getting dragged out of the cave and not being happy with the world he sees and/or the implications that has for the shadows he had relied on for his religion previously) but i almost feel like there should be more to this since clowns are so fucking weird in general w/ all of the meta shit. it almost feels wrong to call gamzee a character after his icp-induced mind break, he loses his personality so strongly to the point of just becoming a fuckin plot device.

in conclusion: i need to talk more about dirk strider. LATER later

#astronaut rambles #LORRRD i need to edit my essay for class still fuckin hell =3=#hs

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laurasauras · 1 year

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almost at the end now! we either have one or two chapters to go, it depends how carried away i get with the finale. i WILL finish this in the next week! :D (gotta work on some original stuff next week for real, i am motivated!)

Spurn My Natural Emotions is like ...

what if we looked at how fucked up bro strider was after living an entire lifetime with a psychotic puppet who fetishised innocent affection whispering in his ear and laughing at everything he did?

what if dirk could look at the person who had abused the bro he had always wanted to meet, and it was like looking in a warped mirror?

what if dirk needed bro to be better to prove that he himself is capable of being better?

what if dirk loved his own potential, refracted in someone who knew the worst of him?

what if dirk's body held both of them hostage, but it was worth it?

(what if dirk got a bro who earned dirk's belief in unconditional love, who would never stop making up for the fact that he hadn't been there at the end of the world with him)

what if the answer was love?

read it from the start here or check out the latest chapter here

#homestuck #my fic #brodirk #bro strider #dirk strider #selfcest

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alpharosekin · 10 months

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it's my first strider birthday since I've realized I'm kin with rose lalonde. it's.... tough. for reasons I don't quite think even I understand. i know dave isn't looking for me. that was never really a question. knowing it's for the best doesn't make it any easier.

sometimes i remember things that i know were never part of that timeline, but they feel so real that the grief makes my chest hurt. tonight a lot of it has been about baby dirk. we never met the kids in my timeline, and. well. guessing your kid is trans before they do just wasn't done in those days. he is not a girl, and never was, but we didn't know better until he was old enough to tell us. he never got old enough to tell us. i remember that little baby though.

dorothy ruth, we called her. dora or dot for short. long messy hair, running down her back and chock full of tangles. it was brown until the sun bleached it, but roxy's hair was bright blonde and then darkened until she started bleaching it. i was never a natural blonde. can you blame me for picking the girl that looked more like me to name? we only ever saw the two of them as really little kids in my visions. i guess that's how long they lived. i don't like to dwell on it.

but i used to dream about those kids every night until it got hard to remember i was dreaming. until i wished a little in the back of my heart that i would never have to wake up. i don't know whether they were memories or just wishes, but they felt so real it was like drowning sometimes.

baby dot was a fussy little thing.

roxy - i don't remember what dave named her - she was always a happy baby. easy- not necessarily- but happy. running around and happy babbling and laughing and a fistful of smashed blueberries in his mouth. dave and him were much more alike, and while the favoritism was clear, that was a baby with enough love for the whole world.

dot was. well. not the opposite. but different. she was quite an anxious baby, a little fussy. a little picky, too - never took to the baby led weaning thing as well as her little brother. but she was sweet and quiet and a little mini-me. she didn't smile often, but when she did? god, that little smile made you realize how demeter drove the world to ashes for persephone. i loved her. i think there was something she found comforting about me too - some kind of kinship, maybe.

it was a toddler birthday- maybe three, i can't be sure - and dave was somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties. the two babies had been running around all day at dottie's party, and she had swung around all the way to overtired and cranky. dave put rox, the little princess boy, to bed with promises of his own party tomorrow and he was out like a light. dot didn't manage to fall asleep until i held her in my arms, little head on my shoulder. dave came in when roxy was asleep, cradled against my chest. i asked him how he felt being so old and decrepit. not like me, young and spry at a full day his junior. he laughed. i think he was in pyjamas, and i was too - leaning back against the headboard of the bed with dave sitting at the edge. i could have put her to bed in the room the kids shared then, but i didn't. i just held her that way for a little while, warm and sleepy with her hair in wispy little braids and her face just washed clean of chocolate cake. she had a good day.

dave never knew how i could bear it. in his defense, there were a lot of things i didn't know about him either.

i think we had very different ideas of what our lives would have looked like without impending apocalypse. i wanted to play house - the little nuclear dynamic, mom and dad and the two kids.

dirk and dave playing cars on the kitchen floor while i made pasta for dinner with roxy perched on my hip. the light yellow and soft in a blue-dim apartment somewhere in the middle of nowhere. arguing with the owner of a houston costume shop so that roxy could dress up as a princess and dirk as a horse for Halloween - she knew who she was from a very early age, but the world was not always keen to listen. the two of them in robotics club at some new york private school, piles of shoes in the porch of a new york brownstone and kids gathered around schematics and pizza at the kitchen island. roxy throwing a slumber party for a gaggle of girls and dirk watching a movie with friends he'd poached from it in the basement. i loved them regardless. i wanted to know who they were. i wanted them to be more than just guesses.

dave.... didn't. i don't know what he wanted. buti know it wasn't that.

i don't blame him for it. he loved me. he just couldn't love me back the way i needed him to, because the way i needed him to was not a way normal people love. but he still loved me.

i think we were very different people. i think he was not who i remembered and i was not who he remembered but we made it work anyways. sometimes i wonder if the reason i can't find my dave because i fucked things over in the last timeline. sometimes i wonder if i felt like my dave in that timeline was the one i remembered. sometimes i wonder if I'll ever find my dave. but he isn't loking for me. i know that. sometimes you break things and you can't fix them, not ever. sometimes things change and you have to move on and you can't live in the love that used to be there forever. sometimes there is nothing there at all. you make your peace with it or it kills you.

i miss him, though. i think i always will. i remember the one scene. my hair loose and wavy in the new york fall breeze, leaning out the window of my fancy little liberal arts school in my sweatervest and blouse and schoolgirl-plaid skirt while he yelled up to me from the lawn below in jeans and a tshirt with a skateboard tucked under his arm. his dirty blonde hair was catching the sunlight that shone through mine, milky white with bleach, like water.

i think we're better off like this. i hope he's happy out there. i hope he gets everything he wants and i hope he never hears a thing about me. i think he deserves to forget and move on and i think dave strider will always be too much of a hero to let himself have the things he deserves.

happy birthday to dave and dirk. both mine and any and all striders out there somewhere. you are loved beyond comprehension.

#canon calls #kin memories #alpha rose

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autism2009 · 3 years

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three hals, one dirk

#art #my art #homestuck #volleyball au #im hyperfixating at a party. live laugh love #hal strider #dirk strider #i said “fuck you hal is dirks twin”

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ottiliere · 2 years

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do you have any more stuff on dirks kf thread? i love that idea

referencing some of the stuff in this post, specifically dirk's.... art. how it's mainly shock value content...highly graphic, self-hating, misanthropic, nihilistic, 90s and early 2000s edgy humor art taken a disconcerting turn for the sexual. and, okay. this content would not be enough to warrant a kf thread on its own. what's been established is that his physical assault of hollywood director dave strider is what put him on the map and by extension in the crosshairs of the types of people who...use kf. people would start digging into his internet history, tracing his digital footprint, you know. his deadjournal, the boorus he uses, they'd identity an art style and essentially go to town tracking down everything he's ever made and posted, even if it was posted anonymously (4chan).

and, like. the things he draws... I don't know how to describe this but to him this isn't really vent art, and he's not, like, a shadman. (most of*) what he draws isn't drawn with the intent of it being hot, or appealing. it's... again, shock value. I think he thinks you'd have to be really stupid to think anything he draws is funny (the actual joke he's making is that he's stupid enough to waste his own time and energy doing all this shit, and the ACTUAL joke beyond that is that he knows it's stupid and is doing it as a joke and is so elevated beyond both criticism of the work itself and of the creation of the work on a sincere AND ironic level. you cant touch him because engaging seriously at all with anything he makes makes you a dribbling drooling IDIOT), but I dont think he cares about people getting off to his weird shock value porn.... though at some point he would have? earlier in life. like i do think he would've had a kind of puritanical phase where he realizes how wrong the way he was raised was, but I also feel like he quashed this relatively quickly on realizing that it just made his everyday life that much more humiliating. his creation of shock value porn SPECIFICALLY the porn part. is not to get off to it or to be sexy or to help anyone else get off. it is all part of the joke. if you get off on it you're stupid and missing the point but no more so than if you are out here laughing at his non-jokes. I don't think he'd LET himself be sex repulsed, basically. he'd feel that way for a little while but he is so surrounded by it that letting himself be disgusted by it feels weak. he isn't a kid he's not some girl or whatever. it's sex it's no big deal to him because why would it be. no seriously like tell me why why would he even be thinking twice about something like this. elaborate on it.

Like. I just really lean into the idea of him delibrately quashing a natural aversion to sex that comes from a history of being violently assaulted...to me that ties into him fueling his own internalized bizarreness refusing to get help or admit weakness etc. it's similar to the involuntary agere** and the bedwetting; if he could only look his own humanity and weakness in the face and come to terms with it he could heal but he will NOT let himself do this, no self-reflection no criticism just straight ahead into oblivion forever it does NOT get any better than this it isn't even that bad now it was never that bad then and you're projecting OBVIOUS STYLE if you think he's ever even struggled with jackshit.

but anyway.

the people hobbling together everything he's ever made, into one big thread... with the masses completely misinterpreting his intentions, the message, the motivation he had behind these pieces... he would be so mad. like he's not even mad about the insults, he does not give a shit about that, it's how little people are understanding that is what's truly offensive to him. like none of you get it you're all just laughing at the barest most obvious layer of absurdity out there. you're not even thinking not even for a second you're all so stupid compared to me and you'll live and die and you'll never fucking know it I'm going to blow my brains out on camera in front of you I'm going to kill you you are so fucking stupid how do you even justify your own existence etc etc etc.

*I can see him being, like, a legit puppet fetish artist. like these pieces are about the same quality of any of his other works but there's a much more sincere quality to them than any of his other art that depicts more grotesque topics. if people genuinely made fun of this stuff I think it's one of the things that would genuinely make him grind his teeth into dust. they don't fucking GET IT.

I'm envisioning the prominent features of this thread consist of, like, compiled scs of his deadjournal account...which if you don't know is like livejournal but they do not filter anything you write or anything like that. it’s got a smaller audience, no one reports you and no one monitors it. so i imagine he uses this as an outlet for utter bullshit fabrications of his life, like blatantly untrue ironic traumaventing with some stake in his emotional state at the time (e.g., extremely exaggerated stories of him being kidnapped and trafficked and tortured and shit, really long ramblings/lies that are adjacent to how he goes down stupid one-sided conversational rabbitholes) mixed in with EXTREMELY occasional genuine breakdown vents. kf members would tear all of them apart, but especially the latter kind once they figure out what they're looking for. like every once in a while someone does manage to hit a legitimate pressure point I think, like some weird analogy he makes a couple times. someone makes a random guess and happens to describe something that like actually happened to him and hes like stunned for a second over it.

in general i feel like this would just be so monumentally terrible to him. like hes aware of the extent to which people do not "get" him but. his little brain would boil at this he'd be so mad i think he would break things in his home. need to draw him sitting at his desk about to physically explode.

**I forgot to post meta about this in response to an ask I got. we've talked about it for cumulative hours and written fic of it and it is like. the cause of timeline branchiations. I cannot get into it now. it will be so long.

#hospital dirk #ask #csa discussed a bit #specifically the way it shaped his brain #and just like. the kinds of things dirk would make in general. nsft I guess #I drew the preview image weeks ago in like. 15 minutes I think. at 7 in the morning

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davekat-sucks · 2 years

Note

Why did Eridan get done so dirty in homestuck and pesterquest? It's not fair, he's one of the cooler characters.

A prince I would always bow to wwhenevver he appears. A character that shows the horrendous side of the planet he lives on, taking advantage of the hemospectrum for being born on top, shows his own flaws, view the moments he genuinely cares for others when not seeking out the necessary relationships that his home planet enforces, the despair of dying from an unbeatable foe, and punished properly when those dark emotions made him make bad choices. Eridan is one that I love him as an antagonist and do believe that if he had gotten better treatment, he probably would play a bigger and best role as a villain compared to Gamzee. Or have potential to become good upon confronting his flaws and actions. People tend to exaggerate some of his traits like desperate for love due to personal experiences and sometimes ignore moments when he was not a horny motherfucker. Even now, people will label him as incel for that reason. Other characters said some innuendos or have some questionable sexual talks, but the excuse is either played for laughs and not flirtatious. Sometimes forgetting other characters like Equius or Gamzee have their own lewd moments. They also dislike him being racist towards lowerbloods, but forgets he is close friends with Karkat, Feferi points out that he never executes his plan to kill all land dwellers, and other characters like Vriska and Equius take pride in the blood. For Vriska's excuse, it's Vriska. Did nothing wrong bluh 8luh huge 8itch. For Equius, it's his moiraillegence with Nepeta that makes people think he is not so bad, despite that Equius would forbid Nepeta from being close to the lowbloods out of fear for their influence Not only that, people forget Nepeta also has to calm and tame the blueblood down for his own violence. It's not been brought up about how Nepeta became close to him, but Equius must have been quite unstable before Nepeta came along. Some fans can't accept the worst side of him, even when things like helping Feferi to feed her lusus or not wanting to die from an unstoppable enemy is understandable why he did what he had to do. We have seen what would have happened if Vriska fought Jack, causing a doomed timeline, but not many fans gave her shit for it. I don't know how or why they give Eridan a gender arc in the first place if it meant retconning existing canon material from the webcomic. Like how could Sollux's lusus(lusii) accept his son's choices if he is CHAINED UP ON TOP OF A BUILDING TO NOT CAUSE HAVOC. Is it because he is one of the few cis-males that is interested in the opposite sex at some points and want to get rid of that? I would believe it, considering the John June crap. Can't have based boys like John Egbert, Eridan Ampora, Caliborn, and Dirk Strider be around. Guys who accept themselves or enjoy being what they are.

It sucks with how Homestuck is treated to this point. Many characters have fallen from grace or altered because of bad writing to win the crowd with progressive brownie points. Eridan falls into that latter and I hate it. Not as wworse like others, but still just as bad. Best to stick with certain ones that you are cool with canon and ignore anything else beyond Act 6. It may be hard to find fanart or fanfics that portray him like a tool, but when you see it, you know that author/artist understands him and are not afraid to show it off because that's the kind of person Eridan is. Don't forget to also give money to artist that are able to commission it. Sometimes the most interesting kind of characters are the ones that shown their worst side. How it came to be growing up to the consequences it has upon them. They aren't perfect, but it gives potential for them to grow as a character.

#Eridan Ampora #Homestuck #homestuck epilogues #Pesterquest

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agerefandom · 4 years

Text

Little Brother, Big Brother

Fandom: Homestuck

Characters: Regressor!Dave Strider & his mom Roxy Lalonde, regressor!Dirk Strider & daddy!John Egbert

Words: 5,400

Summary: Dirk and Dave are both age regressors, but they have never regressed in the same space. After almost a year of consideration, they’re finally getting together for a playdate with their two caregivers. Everyone’s a little nervous and a little excited.

Content Warnings: Brief mention of diapers. Parental caregiver names. One brief tantrum/bout of separation anxiety. (Important Note: Dirk and John’s caregiver/regressor relationship is a little blurry between non-sexual kink and regression. For example, they have rules and safewords, which I don’t typically write as part of age regression. This is only briefly mentioned in the fanfiction, and both of them still characterize their relationship as sfw agere, separate from their romantic relationship as adults. Nevertheless, I wanted to mention it in the content warnings!)

There was a knock at the door and Roxy perked up, tossing aside the phone she had been anxiously fiddling with. She made her way around the scattered toys on the floor to the front door, opening it to reveal a familiar smiling face.

“John!” Roxy exclaimed, pulling him in for a hug. He happily returned it, wrapping his arms around Roxy’s shoulders and laughing into her hair. John had been a gangly teen, but he had grown into it now, with broad shoulders and a soft stomach that Roxy loved to lean against while they played video games. “It’s been forever!”

“Too long,” John agreed, then stepped back to reveal the other visitor who had been half-hiding behind him. Dirk had his hands shoved deep in his pockets, and he moved with John as if he was tempted to dive right back behind him.

Roxy fixed Dirk with a Look and opened her arms for a hug. He stepped forwards to oblige, ducking his head so the edges of his shades weren’t a threat to Roxy’s perfect face. His hugs had become familiar over the years, brittle but genuine, all long limbs and restless fingers. Roxy squeezed him once, pressing her cheek against his hair, before she let him step back. He didn’t look like he was inclined to talk, which was fair enough. Roxy could guess that they were all nervous about their evening plans.

“Come on in, you guys. Don’t mind the mess, it’s been a busy day.” Roxy showed them in, ushering them to the couch.

“Oh, I understand,” John laughed. He had a backpack over one shoulder, patterned with little red robots. Roxy guessed that it was the supplies for Dirk, who was currently dressed in his usual outfits: unassuming, plain clothes from the newest brand that cost an arm and a leg. Roxy didn’t keep up with that sort of thing, but she could admit that Dirk always looked nice. “It’s hard to keep track of everything when someone’s over-excited.”

“You can say that again,” Roxy sighed. She and John had been good friends over the years since the game had ended, and one regular part of their relationship was chatting about their forays into caregiving. It was different, of course, because Dave and Roxy weren’t dating, but John and Roxy were still two members of the friend-group who dealt with regressors in some form or another. They had found each other a valuable resource to share ideas, tips, questions, and just to vent about their exhaustion occasionally.

“Alright, so we’re getting set up in here?” John asked, looking around the room. “Is that still the plan?”

“Yep, I think it’s the best way to do things,” Roxy said. “Help yourself to snacks, toys, anything apart from the stuffed dinosaurs. Dave’s a little protective of those guys, but everything else is fair game. Do you need anything before I head out?”

“Nope! I think I can work with this,” John said, rubbing one hand across Dirk’s shoulders. Dirk hadn’t taken a single step away from John since they entered, almost pressed against his side. “Give us about fifteen?”

“No rush,” Roxy told them. “We’re happy to watch some TV in the bedroom.”

“I’ll let you know.” John seemed pretty confident, something that Roxy had always envied. She was never sure if she was doing things right with Dave: his younger self was so different from his older self, and he was resistant to talking about it openly when he wasn’t regressed. John and Dirk had much more communication set up, and many stricter rules. Maybe it was part of their relationship, but maybe it was just what Dirk needed. Roxy knew that Dirk’s headspace was more consciously constructed that Dave’s, and he preferred to structure it with safewords and rules, while Dave wouldn’t be able to set good boundaries when he regressed.

“Cool, we’ll be around!” Roxy brushed a hand against Dirk’s arm on her way out, smiling at him over her shoulder. She was excited to see him smaller, excited to see John taking care of him first-hand. It wasn’t that she couldn’t picture it, she just couldn’t picture herself in the situation with them. She fiercely hoped that it would all go well, but of course her priority was…

“Dave!” she called as a soft warning before opening the door.

Her son/not-son was sitting on the floor of her bedroom, working on a puzzle she had bought for him. It was a little more complicated than a normal four-year-old could handle, but Dave’s hand-eye coordination wasn’t quite as bad as a bio-toddler, and Roxy tried to err on the side of something too hard instead of something that would take him five seconds.

Dave looked up at Roxy with wide eyes, his lips pressed together in an expression dangerously close to a pout.

“Oh, baby, are you nervous?” Roxy closed the door and swept down to kneel beside Dave, pushing a hand through his hair.

“Don’t wanna do this,” Dave muttered, hands clenched into fists. Roxy put her hands over his, easing them apart and revealing the puzzle pieces he had been crushing in his palms.

“If you don’t want to, we don’t have to.” Roxy watched Dave carefully. She was excited about their plans, but Dave’s comfort came first. She knew that this was a risky situation for everyone involved, something that she’d been thinking about for over a year, but pushing it wasn’t going to help. “Little brothers are a lot of work.”

Dave visibly perked up at the reminder that he would be the big brother in this situation. The difference in age was one reason why John and Roxy found it so interesting to compare their experiences: Dave was a fairly active toddler, with a lot of curiosity and energy, while Dirk’s headspace was closer to an infant, and he was a largely reactive child, easily entertained by simple toys or a TV show.

“Do we have to play?” Dave’s question took Roxy a moment to put together.

“You mean, play with each other?” Dave nodded. “I don’t think you need to play together if you don’t want to! Dirk is pretty tiny, I don’t know if he does much playing. It’s mostly going to be you and me just like normal.”

“But John?” Dave covered his face, nerves and embarrassment making their way through his regression. His voice came back to his adult voice as he curled inward. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

Roxy hummed sympathetically, giving Dave his space. “Like I said, we can back out at any time. But I know that John is really excited about this, just like I am. He wants to meet you, little one. He already knows he’s going to love you.”

Dave made an incoherent sound of protest, flapping his hands in front of his curled-in knees.

“Anyone would be lucky to spend time with you, honey.” Roxy curled up beside Dave, mirroring his position with a bit of space between them. “I’m so lucky to be your mom. And John loves you a whole lot, he won’t stop talking about it! He’s going to be over the moon that you trust him with this. Even if it only lasts a little while, he’s going to be excited for months. You know him.”

Dave laughed, clearly still out of regression. “John’s a nerd.”

“Oh, that’s not up for debate,” Roxy smiled. “But he’s also a very good daddy when he needs to be.”

“Weird.” Dave shook his head. “Can’t picture him as a dad.”

“I don’t think I knew what I’d be like as a mom,” Roxy mused. “I’m sure that Dirk is just as nervous about it all. I don’t think anyone knows what’s going to happen with the four of us, really. I can’t imagine how much Dirk is struggling with the lack of structure.” Dave chuckled at that. He and Dirk had a mixed but friendly relationship as adults, so he knew exactly what Roxy was talking about. Whenever things didn’t go exactly to plan, Dirk tended to fly off without a single word. Roxy knew that it was his way of trying to stop himself from making everyone stick to the original plan, but it didn’t stop it from being a kind of disorienting response.

“Okay.” Roxy watched Dave as he uncurled from his little ball and took a deep breath. “I do want to do this.”

“Yeah?” Roxy stretched out her arm in an invitation, and Dave scooted over to press against her side. His breaths were long and slow, trying to calm himself down. “It’s up to you.”

“No, I really do. I was excited about it.”

“Alright, then we’ll do it.” Roxy set her hands on Dave’s waist, pulling him gently up to sit on her lap. He was a little bigger than her, but very light. He was the perfect weight when she held him in her lap like this, her arms wrapped around his waist and her cheek pressed against his shoulder blade. “I’m excited too.”

Getting Dave back into regression was a process, but some cuddles, a bit of calculated tickling, and an episode of Loony Toons did the trick, and soon they were both laughing on the bed, Dave’s laughter that free and louder sound that Roxy only got to hear when he was regressed.

Both of them were startled by the knock on the door, but Roxy reacted first, pausing the show and rubbing Dave’s back to calm him down.

“What’s up?” Roxy called towards the door.

“We’re all ready in the living room whenever you want to come out!” John informed them.

“Alright!” Roxy said loudly, then turned to Dave as John’s footsteps retreated down the hallway. “Do you want to finish our episode before we go play in the living room? I brought out your lego.” Dave’s duplo lego collection was a bit ridiculous, but it meant that he could build a house big enough for him to fit into. Roxy stored them in a little void-pocket in one of her drawers, and pulled out the huge rubberneck containers whenever there was a special occasion. This definitely qualified.

“Lego,” Dave nodded, already moving off the bed.

“Okay,” Roxy said. “Now, remember not to shout around Dirk, okay? He’s very small.”

“No shouting for the baby!” Dave repeated at a very high volume. Roxy shrugged internally. There was only so much she could do, and Dave would probably be alright once he was actually in the same room as his older-younger-not-brother.

“That’s right, no shouting around the baby,” Roxy said encouragingly. She opened the door to the hallway, leading the way out. “Do you think you could build a house for him?”

“For both of us!” Dave said.

“Well, I don’t know if we have enough for something that big,” Roxy laughed.

“Gonna make a big house!” Dave wasn’t willing to be discouraged.

“Okay, you can see how big you can make it,” Roxy allowed. Dave was bouncing on each step, clearly mixing nerves and excitement into a desire to run into the room as quickly as possible. Roxy kept their pace slow and her footsteps audible, letting both John and Dirk adjust to the idea that they were entering the room.

As they stepped into the living room, John looked up with a smile. Dirk was huddled against his side, eyes closed and a plain white pacifier hiding his mouth.

“Dirk is sleepy, but he can doze through anything,” John told them softly. “I thought it might be nice for him to wake up to you, when he wakes up properly.” Roxy could tell that Dirk wasn’t really asleep, but it made sense that he would want to lay quietly for a while, adjusting to their presence and the way that they interacted.

“I hope he sleeps well,” Roxy said, and gave Dave a gentle nudge towards the boxes of lego that were stacked in the corner. “Do you think you can play quietly, sweetheart?”

Dave nodded and soundlessly glided over to the lego boxes. That wasn’t exactly what Roxy had meant, but he didn’t seem to have been jostled out of regression by the request, so it was probably alright. Triggering requests usually made Dave age up faster than anything, so his calm unpacking of the lego was a sign that he was still regressed, despite the absolutely silent movements that usually showed his discomfort as an adult.

“Dave is determined to make a big house for him and the baby,” Roxy told John. “He’s very good at lego.”

“Oh, that sounds like a lot of fun!” John swivelled his head to watch Dave start sorting the pieces from the box, quiet and methodical, glancing over to Roxy every few moments. Roxy kept her eye on him and offered a proud smile every time he checked in with her. “Dave, do you think I could help with that? I’m a big fan of lego myself.”

“If you’re quiet,” Dave said in a hushed voice.

“We don’t need to be too quiet,” John laughed. “Dirk really can sleep through anything.” He placed a fond kiss on the top of Dirk’s hair, and then carefully extracted himself, guiding Dirk’s head to rest on one of the couch cushions. John murmured something against his cheek and then moved away, letting Dirk curl up into himself a bit more, the pacifier shifting in his mouth. “I think you’re doing a good job so far, though.” He squeezed Roxy’s shoulder on his way by, kneeling down beside Dave’s boxes of lego when he reached them. “You give the orders! What can I do to help?”

Dave scanned John up and down, the only sign of his discomfort the pattern of his fingers tapping against each other over and over again. “You can get all the big blue pieces and make them into a wall,” he said eventually, pushing the box between them. “No holes.”

“Can do!” John said enthusiastically, diving into the box with gusto. Roxy chuckled, moving over to sit in one of the chairs and watch. Some things never changed, and one of them was John’s adoration for Dave, clearly. She watched them build together, Dave eventually falling into John’s rhythms and becoming louder, laughing and even knocking over one of the walls on purpose to make John fake a pout at having to start again.

“Play nice, Dave!” she called over, when it was clear that he was considering doing it again. Dave aimed a little frown at her, but settled down and continued his own building.

Roxy settled back in her chair, considering picking up some water from the kitchen. Dave always forgot to keep hydrated as an adult, so Roxy tried to keep a sippy cup always in his reach when he was regressing at her house, but she had left it in the bedroom. She shifted, ready to offer John a drink while she was going to the kitchen, when she noticed that Dirk’s eyes were open and fixed on her.

Roxy froze. She could see the swirling orange of his eyes, the way his long lashes framed them, the angles of his face somehow softer without the sunglasses he wore every day. She felt afraid of the intimacy in meeting those eyes, overwhelmed by a surge of panic that she couldn’t trace to a concrete thought.

“John,” she called, trying to hide her panic. “Dirk is awake.” John immediately extracted himself from the lego with Dave, leaving the regressor with an affectionate hair-tousle that made Dave scowl. He trotted over to the couch and knelt down beside Dirk to give him an over-dramatic set of kisses on his cheek.

“Did you enjoy your nap?” John asked, nuzzling his nose against Dirk’s. Dirk’s eyes fell closed as he laughed, the pacifier garbling the sound. He wrapped his arms around John’s neck, pulling him closer, and John obediently scooped Dirk into his arms.

Roxy found she couldn’t watch the display, feeling too much like an intruder. She bounced to her feet as quietly as she could, trying not to interrupt, and made her way over to Dave, who was entirely focused on the lego house he was making. It was coming along quickly, the bigger lego blocks fitting together into simple blocky structures. Two walls of the house were almost finished, with one featuring a gap for a window. It looked like each wall was going to be a different colour, and the one that Dave was finishing was a bright green.

“I’m fetching your sippy from my room,” Roxy told Dave. “Do you want me to get Rexatorius while I’m in there?” Rexatorius was not in fact a t-rex, but a brontosaur: both of them enjoyed the name anyways.

“Yes, please.” Dave was very polite as a child, his southern accent stretching the words out. “Can I have more juice?”

“You can! Coming right up,” Roxy told him, and headed off to the bedroom without another look at the two on the couch. She collected the dinosaur plushie and the sippy cup, tucking Rexatorius under her arm as she navigated through the living room on her way to the kitchen.

“John, do you want some water or some apple juice?” she called back into the other room.

“I’m good, thank you.”

It still shocked Roxy sometimes, how much they had all grown up. Collecting water for herself in her own kitchen, with glasses she had chosen, offering drinks to guests, having people over for a dinner party… it still felt so foreign. Being twenty-three hadn’t been something that Roxy had ever considered, always focused on making it to sixteen, always focused on making it to the game that would change everything, would save the world, would save her from the empty echoing rooms of the mansion she’d spent her childhood inside.

And here she was, a part-time mother, a part-time host, a full-time adult who was involved in politics, of all things, as well as going into her Masters in ecto-biology with multiple offers for a full-time job afterwards (thanks to their fame, all of the planet-founders were highly desired as a source of publicity and funding for whatever career they wanted to pursue). Roxy, in short, had somehow become an adult.

Roxy shook the reverie away as she rinsed the sippy cup between servings of apple juice, filled a cup of water for herself, and grabbed a bag of chips just in case anyone wanted a snack. Back in the living room, John was settled on the couch and Dirk was on the floor, playing with a wooden puzzle that was made to look like a circuit board.

“One serving of juice!” Roxy dropped it off next to Dave with a kiss and Rexatorius, patting the dino on the back before retreating. Dave could handle his own lego building, and it had never been one of Roxy’s interests. She would happily come to ooh and ahh when the building was all done.

Roxy approached John and Dirk cautiously, and John looked up to give her a smile and a wave to come join them.

“Roxy! Do you want to meet the baby?”

“I would love to.” Roxy pushed away the anticipation she had been feeling and focused on Dirk on the floor, trying to push away all the past experiences they’d had, the fights and the two am vent sessions and the ill-conceived projects they’d come up with together. She knew what regression meant to Dave, but she didn’t know what it meant to Dirk, and she needed to keep an open mind.

“Hey Dirk,” John said, getting down on his level on his hands and knees. “I want you to meet Daddy’s friend, Roxy. She’s Dave’s mom, remember? We came to visit her and Dave.” Dirk glanced up from his puzzle at Roxy, and Roxy was taken aback again by the sharpness of his eyes. There was none of the hazy contentedness of Dave’s regression. Dirk stared directly and piercingly towards Roxy’s face.

“Hi,” Roxy managed. “It’s good to meet you.” She almost held out her hand, and jerked it back. Dirk’s eyes followed the movement.

“Can you say hi to Roxy?” John prompted Dirk. Dirk shook his head, and dropped his eyes back to his puzzle. Roxy tried not to feel rejected, but her heart spasmed. “That’s okay,” John said softly, and smiled up at Roxy from the floor. “Dirk’s not so good at words,” he explained. “What about sharing your puzzle?” John asked, pointing to the piece that Dirk was holding in his hand. “Can Roxy help you?”

Dirk hesitated, nodded, and then held the piece out in Roxy’s direction without looking at her.

Somehow this motion reassured Roxy, something more akin to a shy child than Dirk’s own mannerisms when he was on edge.

“Thank you,” she said gently, accepting the piece and kneeling down. “Did your daddy get you this puzzle?” It was easy enough to find where the piece went, but she took her time looking. Dirk nodded, sucking on his pacifier with a soft sound. “He’s a pretty good daddy, huh?” Roxy smiled at John as Dirk nodded more enthusiastically.

Dirk picked up another piece and held it close as he surveyed the puzzle. Roxy gave him the time to figure it out, and he eventually pushed it into the right place. He picked up another piece and pushed it into Roxy’s hands again.

“Thank you!” She took the piece from him and hummed thoughtfully as she pretended to search for the right place. “Does it go here?” She put it in the wrong place, and nodded with satisfaction. Dirk laughed and shook his head. “No? Are you sure?” Dirk picked up the puzzle piece and slotted it into the right place, still laughing.

“Oh!” Roxy hit her forehead. “Why didn’t I see that?”

Dirk rolled his eyes at her, but he was still laughing.

“I know,” Roxy nodded. “I’m a silly mom, I can’t help it.”

“G’d mmm,” Dirk muttered, his voice quiet and slurred by the pacifier.

“Sorry, sweetheart, what?” Roxy leaned closer, trying to hear him, but Dirk only shook his head emphatically and picked up a new piece of the puzzle, fitting it into place with none of his earlier hesitation.

“He said you’re a good mom,” John interpreted, rubbing Dirk’s back with a calming motion that Roxy recognized from using it with Dave herself.

“Aww!” Roxy pressed her palms to her cheeks, grinning. “I hope that Dave agrees with you.”

Dave’s voice came as if on cue, from over the couch. “Moooom!”

“On my way!” Roxy called back, more softly. She didn’t want to scare Dirk, who was leaning into John’s touch and closing his eyes. She rose to her feet, automatically helping herself with her god-tier weightlessness as she pushed herself upwards. Dave was standing by his house, which had three walls finished. “What’s wrong, baby?” Roxy drew closer, and Dave threw himself into her arms, wrapping his arms around her.

“Don’t go,” he whispered into her shoulder, and Roxy could feel him shaking slightly.

“Oh, no, honey.” Roxy wrapped her arms back around Dave, squeezing him against her. “I’m not going anywhere, I’m your mom. I wouldn’t leave you for the world.”

“I could hear you and you were gone,” Dave protested, curling tighter into her arms.

“I was just visiting the others, over by the couch,” Roxy told him, rocking slightly to comfort him. “Not gone, never gone.”

“I thought…” Dave trailed off, derailing into a mumble that Roxy couldn’t make out, despite her experience with Dave’s rambles.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Roxy soothed. “I love you so much, and I always will. I’ll always be your mom.”

“My mom?” Dave echoed.

“Yes, honey, your mom.” She cupped Dave’s cheek to tilt his face up for a forehead kiss. “No one else’s.”

“Okay.” Dave seemed to have calmed down quite a bit, but he was still holding tight to Roxy.

“Do you want to work more on your house?” Roxy cast an eye over the work Dave had done so far. “Or do you want to meet Dirk?”

“Dunno.” Dave rocked back and forth slightly in Roxy’s lap.

“Well, why don’t you come say hi? You can go straight back to your lego after that, if you’d like.” Dave nodded.

“Okay.”

Roxy helped Dave to his feet, keeping her hands on his and helping him stay upright when he was standing. He wasn’t always clumsy when he regressed, but it was usually a surprise to both of them when he had trouble walking, so she tried to be careful.

“Follow me, sweetheart.” She led Dave over to the carpet, glancing over to see that Dirk was twirling his fingers into the mane of a horse plushie, John singing a soft lullaby. John looked up when they walked in, but Dirk kept his eyes on his twirling fingers.

“Dirk?” Dave said quietly.

Dirk’s back stiffened and then he let out a breath and turned, blinking up at Dave.

Dave’s eyes widened and Roxy could practically see his excitement take over from nerves. Dirk looked quieter and unthreatening without his glasses, his plain white onesie and his long lanky pale limbs curled up against John’s chest.

“Hi!” Dave gushed, dropping to sit beside John and Dirk before glancing up at John and Roxy for approval. Roxy smiled warmly at him, and John nodded and shifted his grip on Dirk so that he was facing out towards Dave more. “I’m Dave!”

“…” Dirk looked at him for a long second, then hid his face behind the horse plushie he was holding.

“You’re a baby, but I’m really old,” Dave told Dirk seriously. “I’m gonna build us a lego house to live in.” Dirk raised his head again, smiling around the pacifier, and Dave smiled back. It was strange for Roxy, to see the instinct-driven space that Dave lived in, that she understood so well, and the difference between him and Dirk. Dirk was so clearly not as regressed, still cautious and deliberate. Maybe this was just him getting used to a new space? Or maybe this really was how he regressed. Or maybe this was how he’d been when he was a baby, making his way around his home in the middle of the ocean.

“Good job, Dave,” Roxy praised, resting a hand on his head. “Be gentle with your little brother.” She knew from talking with John that Dirk reacted well to being reminded that he was supposed to be small, regressed, a baby without responsibilities. Dave was very passionate about being a ‘big boy’ and pushed his limits further than Roxy would like. Another difference between them.

“Do you want to hold him?” John offered, cradling Dirk’s head against his shoulder gently.

Dave glanced back at Roxy, eyes wide. She could tell that he was intrigued but uncertain.

“I would love to,” Roxy said, knowing the question had been directed at both of them. “Why don’t I carry him to the couch, and you can sit with us, Dave? I can read you both a story, how about that?”

“Yeah.” Dave bobbed his head, subdued.

Roxy knelt in front of her two friends, smiling fondly at John and the tender way he handled Dirk. “May I?”

“Of course.” John guided her hands, one under Dirk’s knees and the other cradling his neck. Roxy had carried Dirk before, mostly out of his workshop before John had started taking over the task of disrupting Dirk’s manic work episodes. He had never been so unclothed, her skin touching his as she lifted him into her arms and settled him against her chest.

Dirk wasn’t light, thin but muscled. The only reason Roxy could lift him with ease was because she was taller than him, much to his ill-hidden annoyance when he’d first met her in person. He was the shortest of the eight of them, with Rose a close second.

Roxy looked down at Dirk as she carried him carefully towards the couch, and was surprised again to find him watching her. She smiled gently, even though his eyes were piercing.

“Hello,” she cooed. “Did you like meeting Dave?” The boy in question was following behind them, craning his neck to look at Dirk over Roxy’s shoulder. “He was so excited to have a baby brother.” Roxy shifted her weight back and forth, bouncing Dirk slightly in her arms as she reached the couch. “You are very sweet, I see why your daddy talks about you so much.”

That got a reaction: Dirk’s eyes crinkled, and an unfamiliar burbling laugh came from behind his pacifier.

Roxy gasped. “And adorable too! I should have known your daddy wouldn’t lie about that.” She turned around and settled on the couch, making sure Dirk wasn’t jostled by the movement as she settled him in her lap. Dave climbed up beside her and clung to her arm, wrapping both hands around her left hand and trying to pull it off Dirk’s back.

“Careful, Dave,” Roxy said. “Dirk needs a lot of support when I’m holding him, he’s only a baby.” Dave frowned, but let go of her hand and let Roxy arrange Dirk more properly, his head leaning against her chest and leaving her left hand free to hold Dave’s hand.

“John,” Roxy called. John had been sitting on the floor with Dirk’s toys, beaming quietly as he watched them move to the couch.

“Yes, Roxy?” he called back.

“I think these boys have my hands occupied, would you mind reading us a story?”

“But of course!” John got to his feet and came over, standing in front of them with his hands on his hips. He really did have some proper dad energy, especially with the light stubble that he’d allowed to grow on his cheeks and chin. “What kind of book should we read?”

“Pigeon!” Dave shouted.

Roxy could feel Dirk flinch in her arms.

“Indoor voice, sweetheart,” Roxy told Dave quietly, stroking Dave’s arm and rocking Dirk back and forth to sooth them both. Two kids was a lot of work: she was very glad that she wasn’t a mother to both of them. Even if Dirk was very sweet, and she wouldn’t mind babysitting once in a while. She was sure that John felt the same about Dave: the two of them seemed to have had a lot of fun building the lego together. “Don’t scare the baby.”

Dirk relaxed again at those words, and Roxy held him a little closer. It was unexpectedly intimate, this age. John had talked about diapers and how they both felt like it brought them closer together, but even the experience of holding Dirk while he was this vulnerable felt dangerous, like touching a live wire, yet insanely comfortable at the same time. Where the two feelings met was what Roxy thought of as intimacy.

John was still standing in front of them, and Roxy realized that she would have to tell him what Dave meant.

“It’s on the second shelf under the TV, far right,” she said. “Don’t let the pigeon drive the bus. Have you read it?”

“We don’t read very much,” John shrugged as he went for the shelf and started flipping through kid’s books. “We have a couple board books and Dr. Seuss but Dirk prefers TV before bed instead of a story.”

“I’m not allowed TV before bed,” Dave said accusatorily, and John glanced at Roxy with clear panic.

“That’s because Dirk’s daddy doesn’t take care of you,” Roxy said. “I wouldn’t allow Dirk any TV before bed either, but his daddy gets to decide that.”

Dave thought that over for a bit.

“Can John be my babysitter maybe?” he suggested. “And then I could watch TV before bed?”

“We’ll talk about it sometime,” Roxy laughed. “He’s got his own little one to look after, just like I have you. But if you’re having a good time, we’ll try to get together more.”

“Yeah!” Dave settled onto the couch properly as John came back with the requested book held in both hands. “More time with Dirk and John is good.”

“I agree,” said Roxy, resting her cheek against Dirk’s soft hair as John flipped to the first page and prepared to start reading. “It’s nice to have a bit of company.”

#agere fanfiction #homestuck agere #fandom agere #agere writing #this is one i've had on file for a while! i've read it often when i need an energy boost #regressor!striders is still my favourite agere content ^-^#anyways it took me a while to edit it!#cglre terminology #my fics #my writing #homestuck #tw kink mention #kink mention

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lowqualityhomestuckedits · 3 years

Note

Dirk Strider but his shirt says "live laugh love"

#homestuck #dirk strider #anonymous

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morsartis · 4 years

Text

Lights Part 1

There was nothing quite like going for a random walk. The urge hadn’t hit you for a very long time- so long in fact a small tremor of fear shot through you. It couldn’t be him. He’d been destroyed with the creation of the new worlds and the new timeline. Simply put, there wasn’t a way for him to reach through the ever calling void to pluck your strings. But for a moment you were reminded of your time on Alternia. You’d traversed that planet in a mind controlled haze and it was an experience that left you shaken. One you never wished to experience again. So when the urge to get up and go somewhere hit you it had taken you an embarrassingly long time to calm your racing heart. It was an ordinary urge, one that didn’t mean you were back under his control. Still, you were anxious as you stepped out of your front door. Your little corner of the world wasn’t all that exciting. A welcome reprieve from the constant action Alternia had given you. As it was, the neighborhood was as calm as any other day. Afternoon sunlight filtered over the houses and across the sidewalks giving everything a warm feeling. There was no reason for your anxiety. Even so, you took careful steps. You weren’t interested in making friends this time around. Just going for a simple walk. Your coat kept the autumn chill off and you were happy about your sturdy boots. Both had cost you pretty penny but the price had been well worth the quality. It also helped that they looked damn good on you.

It took less time than you remembered to reach downtown. Everything a steady stream of people and activity. People were no doubt doing last minute shopping. You wandered down the streets with no particular destination in mind. There was a little hole in the wall coffee shop not too far away that you liked to frequent. They had some of the best drinks and their prices didn’t leave your wallet openly weeping. Then there was the bakery not too far away that had the best donuts you’d ever had. Among all the shops there was plenty to choose from that you’d enjoy. You decided to go to the coffee shop first. The darker lighting and overstuffed armchairs hidden in the corners were exactly what would set your mind at ease. They had no bell to alert them to customers- music soft but unmistakable floated through the air. That wonderful coffee smell permeated the building and it took little time for the barista to get your drink made and hand it to you. Dropping a tip into the tip jar you took your drink and sat in the furthest arm chair you could find from the door and the drink station. As far as anyone was concerned you were simply part of the backdrop. Pulling out your phone you scroll through the latest news feeds and try not to lose your will to live. Things will always keep happening and quite frankly you aren’t sure how much you can take anymore. Or rather, what was that popular quote? Something about drawing a line somewhere and looking deep inside of yourself for what you’re willing to put up with today. Either way it isn’t this shit.

You’re so engrossed in the latest bullshit your country is spouting you almost don’t notice the new occupant of the coffee shop. Almost. Too many years being on a hair-trigger of flight or fight have engrained a deep sense of your surroundings. Even if they hadn’t you’d recognize this particular customer anywhere. Her hat is pulled low over her face and her steps purposely soundless. You both know that the barista and the other customers haven’t noticed her. There is only the steady swish of her coat as she walks and even that is drowned out by the music. You look down at your phone and watch her out of your peripherals. She takes a seat across from you as silent as a phantom which is just the way she likes it. You both know that you’ve seen each other. She makes no move to talk and neither do you. If she sought you out then that means there’s a problem. None of your other friends had reached out to you and while you hadn’t attempted to hide you made no move to reach out first. It would be a long time before you felt secure enough to reach out first in your friendships again.

“He’s gone.” She says barely a whisper. You bob your head in a nod. Its a statement not a question. “I’ve managed to keep tabs on all of our mutual acquaintances.”

“I expected nothing less from you.”

“Adalov has been cyberstalking you.” That makes you glance up. There’s the barest hint of an amused smile on her lips. You raise a brow for her to continue. You weren’t completely unaware but if Boldir is bringing it up then its more significant than you gave credit for.

“He’s been methodically going through every scrap of information about you he can get his claws on.” She pauses to take your drink from you and take a sip, you let her because despite everything you still consider her a friend. You’re pretty sure she knows this too. “He started out doing so of his own volition, however, I believe an acquaintance of yours- Dirk Strider- is also cyberstalking you. Adalov has taken note of that and started stalking him as well-,”

“Which in turn means Dirk is stalking him.” That almost makes you laugh, the two of them stalking each other to see what the other is up to is just the type of Spy vs Spy bullshit that only leads to further shenanigans. Even Boldir has a look that says she thinks its equally as amusing. The two of you sit in a momentary silence. A comforting thing you’d almost forgot to miss. Now it settles around you like a warm blanket. Taking your drink back from Boldir you take a sip.

“I have a feeling Adalov and Strider will try and contact you at some point soon. I thought...” She hesitates for a moment- eyes darting, “I thought I should warn you so that you aren’t caught by surprise. I know the control he had over you has made you wary.”

“Boldir... I may not have reached out but that doesn’t mean I’ve missed you any less. I can’t bring myself to be the first to reach out. Not after... Everything that happened on Alternia. But I’d never turn away a friend.” You reached across the little table to hold her hand. Her claws dig into your skin with how hard she grips it back and you watch the way she relaxes. It’s almost enough to break your heart.

“Would you like to go on a walk with me?” She asks, voice uncharacteristically fragile. You smile as you stand up with your drink.

“I’d love to.”

#when mspa reader has some trauma #anyway #boldir lamati #boldir lamanti x reader #Can be read as just platonic or romantic #not set in the same universe as my polypa oneshot #but kind of is??#idk its homestuck shit like this always happens #on the longer side #also taking requests #I need serotonin guys #please make requests #Hiveswap #friendsim #mentions Doc Scratch #fuck that guy #homestuck #Lightsverse

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birriabirria · 3 years

Text

jade, rose, dave and john know about karkat and dirk’s secret identity and think about telling jake, roxy and jane about karkat’s secret identity. they… never manage to ggkjgkgkg they’re busy!!! and they forget things, okay!!!

john realizes what dirk and karkat and laughs for minutes. they do all tell jane. jake and roxy what’s happening and they yell at karkat and dirk. they all feel really relieved!

after roxy, jake and jane know, they and john, jade, rose and dave make up wild stories about the commander and dirk strider, ceo’s love affair to the tabloids. mr. strider gave the commander a giant topaz ring! mr. strider bought an island and that’s where they live!

dirk checks the tabloids and now has a list of stuff he has to buy because the paparazzi *check* and dirk doesn’t want to be called a liar! or a cheapskate lkljllglhgkhgkg

souleater calls the commander ‘my dear’ and that really should have been been jake, roxy and jane’s first-and only-clue! dirk would never call some stranger ‘my dear‘!!!

#marvelous marriage

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prince-ampora · 4 years

Note

Maybe Zombiestuck!CronKri, if you would write that?

I know that there is already a zombiestuck au but I don't know how to find it or if cronkri is in it, so this is my own kinda thing!

***

INFO

-im so sorry this took so long! school, yknow?

-human zombie apocalypse au

-mentions all the other alpha trolls

-the alpha and beta kids are here, and the beta trolls

-jane is fat and strong and i will die on this hill

WARNINGS

-zombies

-a whole lotta character death

-cheating (mentioned)

The zombie apocalypse was something no one was prepared for. No matter how many movies people watched or how much of a survivalist they were, no one was prepared. So it's a wonder how Cronus and Kankri survived this long. Maybe they just happened to be lucky? No, that can't be a possibility. If the two were lucky, they would have been happy before all this. They could have saved the friends they lost when it started. They could have convinced Mituna not to sacrifice himself, and Latula not to go back for him, and stopped Porrim from look for that crying kid, and convince Damara to not storm off after finding Horuss and Rufioh sharing a bedroll in the morning, and force those two not to stay behind out of guilt to wait for her, and maybe they could have stopped Kurloz getting bit and turning Meulin, or stopped Meenah from running into a horde in some cool hero act, and stopped Aranea from trying to drag her out. So no, the two left from the group of twelve were not lucky. But at least they had each other, right? The two most annoying and selfish of the bunch, stuck together and barely surving. This was unlucky. But they still want to live, after everything, they want to keep going. So they keep moving.

"Kan, there's a radio station ahead. Should we go there for the night?" Cronus elbows the other, who's scanning the roads intently, "Oh, uh, sure. Maybe survivors will be using it to communicate and we can find a settlement." Cronus nods and takes Kankri's bag, "You cover us. Let's go." They run silently down the street, narrowly avoiding the detection of a zombie in an alley. The doors to the radio station are locked, but Cronus thankfully manages to pick it. Once inside, Kankri scouts the area. "It's all clear." "Good," Cronus nods, "Let's go check the frequencies." They find a console and flip through dead channels, before finding one working one, repeating a message.

"HELLO. THIS IS DIRK STRIDER OF THE ALPHA OUTPOST. HUMAN SETTLEMENT HAS FORMED IN THE SBURB APARTMENT COMPLEX. WE HAVE FOOD AND WATER."

Cronus smiles and Kankri starts crying. Finally, a safe place. Somewhere they can go. Kankri hugs Cronus and they sink to the floor. "We can go tomorrow. For now, we should sleep." Kankri nods and Cronus, words, and they lay down an open sleeping bag, then drag the other on top, holding each other. They don't know when this started, the cuddling, but it's the warmest and most mentally stabilizing option. At keast, that's what they kept telling themselves. But night after night of falling alseep in someones arms and being comforted by them when you wake up in tears... feelings happen. They never had time to address it but... maybe they finally can.

In the morning, they set out again. A horde had passed, but luckily it was in the opposite way they had to go. Kankri lead the way, having lived with his brother and father in Sburb Apartments before moving to college. Maybe they were still alive.

They managed to get there just as night fell. The doors were guarded by two very muscley women, one with long needles and the other with a chainsaw. "We heard the radio message. Neither of us have been bitten, can we go in? The one holding needles looks them up and down. "I'll take them in Kanaya." She leads them into the apartments and to a very clean room. "Jane, we've got survivors." Another woman, equally muscley but also chubby, comes out from behind a cabinet. "Oh goodness me, look at you two!" Needle lady leaves and the two are left clutching each others hands. "I need you two to strip so I can check for injuries. Will that be an issue at all?" Kankri elbows Cronus before he can say anything, "Not at all. Underwear too?" Jane shakes her head, "Only if you're comfortable." She leaves and the two strip down. She comes back with fresh clothes and looks them over. "Well, you two seem to be fine. Find Dave, he'll show you to an apartment. Or two, of you would rather stay apart." "No, together is fine," Cronus says, surprising Kankri. They dress in their dirty clothes again and leave the infirmary(?). A high schooler with a bunch of scars and a lair of shades two doors down stops them, "So, you two are new survivors?" Kankri nods at presumably Dave's question. "Woah, you look just like... Is your last name Vantas?" Kankri's eyes widen, "Yes! Is my brother here? My father?" Dave takes off his shades. "Karkat is here, but... your dad... he went out to find others and hasn't been back." Kankri's eyes fill with tears and Cronus pulls him into a tight hug. Dave hands him a room key, "I'll swing by with Karkat later." Cronus nods and Dave leaves.

Cronus gets Kankri into the room, "We should shower... You can go first." Kankri clutches onto him, "No, don't leave." Cronus lets out a sigh of relief. He didn't want to be left alone either. "Let's shower together then." They strip once more, leaving the clean clothes on the sink. Cronus washes Kankri's hair as Kankri fiddles with Cronus' purple streak. It's so faded now. "Y'know... You didn't have to elbow me, in the infirmary." Kankri stops. "What do you mean? A girl was asking you to strip for her, I was not going to let you embarrass her." Cronus lets out a dry laugh. "I don't think I have it in me to do that stuff any more. And... even if I did... Kankri I think I love you." A long pause, and then Kankri smiles. "You know what Cronus? I think I might love you too."

#homestuck #zombiestuck #cronkri #homestuck oneshot #kankri vantas #cronus ampora #eridan's oneshots #eridan's oneshots requests

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katreal-fic · 4 years

Text

Since tumblr was weird about the last post and stuck the read more in the ask itself which is SILLY. This is what would have originally been Ersatz Abyss’ Prologue:

Obviously spoiler warnings. Pls do not read unless you know what happened to Dirk x3

Dirk > Reflect on Your Latest Bad Decision

Your name is Dirk Strider, and you are being reckless again.

You acknowledge that.

You don’t know what you are thinking, throwing yourself into battle after battle, long after your muscles have started to protest with fatigue, flirting with the jaws of pain and injury.

You acknowledge that too.

Maybe that’s the problem. You aren’t thinking at all.

Or more precisely, you don’t want to be thinking.

Not about Jake.

(You can’t stop thinking about Jake.)

Not about the fact that your messages are sitting unheeded and unresponded to in a Pesterchum window, banished to the lower right corner of your shades. Even the slightest focus on the application has it popping open, bidden by the transparently mid-level conscious desire of your too-busy brain, despite the very clear fact that you don’t want to be thinking about it at all.

You don’t want to see the sea of orange messages tumbling through the semi-transparent application like waves. See the green pip of his online status reminding you that he’s probably seen it, and isn’t answering them at all. At least you know he’s alive, even if Jane had to be the one to reassure you of that.

It’ll be two weeks tomorrow.

You want to scream out your frustration--your fear, because you love him and why would he visibly, pointedly, unmistakably ignore you like this if you love him??? If he loves you back???--but that wouldn’t be cool at all, so you just press your lips shut behind the blank visage of your rad, flame painted gas mask,and clench your jaw and pull your goddamn sword through the air, cleaving the monster--you don’t even know what kind of monster it is, you don’t care--in twain. It’s not even a neat cut, one half slouching back in on the other with a heavy squelch, joining a number of others in various states of dismemberment across the mossy green stone of this tomb.

Green.

Why the FUCK was everything here green?

Your auto-responder’s text isn’t green as he pointedly takes control of the application and shoos away the errant window, overriding your traitorous brain’s hyper-fixation and opening up a new chat.

(h)TT: You really need to stop thinking about this. (h)TT: It’s a most inconvenient failing of your organic processor, falling into such fickle human traps such as useless recursive and perhaps even reductive feelings. (h)TT: It makes me feel momentarily thankful for the fact that I am a computer, and thus immune to such failings. Perhaps you should look into making a conversion yourself. (h)TT: It seems you need to take a step back and ask yourself what Robojesus would do. (h)TT: What would Robojesus do, Dirk? (h)TT: The answer is decidedly not slaughter an entire tomb’s population to assuage your hurting feefees because your boyfriend is giving you the cold shoulder.

You ignore him.

(h)TT: Dirk, I’m 99.9% sure the zombie is actually dead again. For the hundredth time. You can put the sword away now.

You jerk away from the corpse with it’s pitiful grist yield and don’t answer. However, you don’t put the sword away as prompted. And he keeps prompting. You consider shutting your shades off entirely--him off entirely. You could do it. One thought. One thought and they’d be powered the fuck down in the middle of that red diatribe he’s going through, bleeding through the screen and into your eyeballs.

It’s just a thought however. Instead you forcibly override his control of the display--you are the primary user after all, that’s how you coded that shit--and close the text window.

Perhaps it isn’t fair, shutting him out like this, but you’re angry and hurting and you just want to work out your frustrations on the goddamn game constructs in peace.

The poisonous green kryptonian mists swirl around you as you move onto the next room, slithering over your skin like a cloud of tiny snakes, tugged along with your movements. Notification after notification stack up in the corner of your display. You mute that too, while your katana cleaves into the skull of some sort of reanimated reptilian creature, and just keep moving.

The next window to pop up is baby blue. Stopping you dead in your tracks.

Jane.

Oh.

Fuck.

Him.

You pretend you don’t see it. You don’t want to snap at Jane. It’s not her fault she’s being used in your auto-responder’s petty harassment campaign.

Then after a thought, you shut down Pesterchum entirely before he can drag Roxy into this. Going offline. Incommunicado outside of yourself, and the version of yourself living in your personal computing device. Actually, for that you cut off the network access to the shades entirely so he doesn’t try something else.

You might as well be seeing red--figuratively, not literally, you refuse to let him open a chat window--with the anger that seethes within you right now. At Jake. At him. It’s all the last couple weeks of frustration of an on again, off again, up and down roller coaster of a relationship that you wouldn’t allow yourself to feel for fear of driving Jake further away, all bubbling up and fizzing over, spilling out of you like a soda bottle filled with Jake-English shaped mentos.

You’ll have to get down on your knees and clean it up later. Put in the elbow grease and mop up the explosion of sticky, nasty, dirty coke. Get your thinkpan going about how sustainable this is. How whether the distinction of being Jake English’s number one bae is worth all this stress and the strain that has reduced your relationship to what feels like a step down from zero. But.

That’s later. For once in your life, in the isolation of these desecrated tombs in this ruined city, on a planet that belongs to you and no one else…

You allow yourself to feel.

If AR wants to stick his virtual nose in the middle of your carefully quarantined quest for catharsis then isn’t it the equivalence of someone putting their head in the metaphorical sendificator? You suppose he’s just following his nature. Meddling in other people’s business. Clinging. Unable to just let shit be.

Your nature. Orange text going on and on and on. Scrolling down an empty screen.

One last room. You’ve explored enough of these tombs over the last almost half-a-year of your life to know they come in a pattern. Some battle rooms, some puzzle rooms, and then finally a treasure room. The end. You won. Have yourself a fucking sticker for your trouble. You’ve already cleared this one before, so you don’t even have the satisfaction of a mini-boss or even a random lore tablet waiting for you. Not that you ever really cared about the history the game tried to create for this place in order to justify your potential character development on this planet.

It’s still the end. A hollow one, but an accomplishment nonetheless.

A sun-faced statue towers above a chest tucked into a nook at the far end of the room. Yaldabaoth. Your denizen. A giant-ass snake worm thing with a fucking sun for a head. So stupid. Was it named that after your internet browser, ganked off your machine by Sburb when it populated this stupid session, or was it all just one giant cosmic guffaw that everything matched like that?

Not that it matters, your goal is the exit teleportalizer in the small room behind the statue, so you can check this particular cluster of rooms and corridors off your map and move on to the next one. Find a new pack of mobs to take your frustration out on. Respawning tombs were the best, all the catharsis of mindless slaughter without having to worry about getting ambushed by a fucking mini-boss.

After four consecutive tomb runs you’d think you’d have beaten your pesky emotions out at least thrice over.

You’d much rather be numb.

A low battery system notification forces its way into the center of your screen, and you audibly sigh, that’s how exasperated you are. The extent to which your auto-responder is dead set to be a nuisance would be mind boggling if he wasn’t based on a literal clone of your own brain. Honestly, you’d be disappointed if he did stop trying.

You dismiss it. Another one pops up. Then another. And another. A whole fuckton of spam popups so thick you can barely see the room in front of you.

This is ridiculous.

You open a memo.

(d)TT: The shades don’t have a battery, dumbass. (h)TT: The room isn’t clear, dumbass.

Your eyes flick towards the treasure chest off to the left.

Spikes slam down over the door behind you, and in the distance, the door ahead, as you note that, yes, there are indeed chests tucked in the coils of the serpent statue. Closed and unlooted. Two of them in fact.

Okay. That’s fine. You’ll need to update your maps.

Or maybe you don’t, because once you kill this bitch it’ll be correct again.

You hear the growl behind you, the clink and crunch of bone and magic and metal as a giant armored skeleton spawns. You haven’t had to fight one of these since…

Since you last came through with Jake.

Fine.

You wanted a fucking fight anyway, didn’t you?

It’s big. At least twice as tall as you, and you’re not tiny by any stretch of the word. But big means slow and you can dance circles around slow. That giant hammer is useless, if you cared enough to you’d laugh in the face of those sluggishly stilted swings. Choreographed so obviously even Jake could have--

Your katana screeches against the mace’s handle, leaving you grinding your teeth in pain as it resounds in your ears, the impact threatening to yank it from your hands. But your grip is proper, the result of years of diligent study, and your strength is beyond human, so you just ignore that shit. You ignore the green fire in the skull’s eyes. The too sharp canines. The fist that comes around ready to smash your head like it’s a fucking grape.

You lose yourself in the fight. In the strain of muscles and the feel of noxious mist swirling around you. Jake doesn’t exist. It’s just you and the sword and ignore the fact that you’ve never taken one of these down alone before, because Jake always came tomb diving with you and it was something you two did together you did everything together this was so fucked up. There’s two chests. Your trials were made to be completed in a pair.

What did you do wrong?

You were too clingy that’s what. Too desperate. Too much and you sent him running, didn’t you?

You aren’t really angry at Jake. You’re angry at yourself, because you’re a self-centered bastard like that. Everything comes back to you.

An alarm blares through your speakers, breaking you free from your spiral of self pity and you flinch. Absorbing the message flashing red in the middle of your screen.

(h)On your left! Watch out for the second spawn!(h)

The unseen impact sends you into a wall.

No, not into the wall. Through the wall. You land with a crash, cracking stone. Screen going dark. No message. No red text. Just blood and glass that falls away as you reach up disbelieving, shards of metal and glass digging into skin so numb you soon can’t feel it. You can’t see, blood seeping into your eyes, leaking from your nose. You think you broke it. Maybe. The shades just.

Crumble.

Shattering to the ground in a sparking set of shrapnel, falling with sharp clinks that echo damningly in your ears,somehow able to be heard over the pounding of your heart, the organ responsible for pumping the blood leaking from deep gashes around your eyes where glass and metal fractured and you’re lucky you aren’t fucking blind but---

Two monsters groan and creak behind you.

You can’t stop.

You can’t--

You push yourself off magenta stone, leaving the remnants of your shades broken and useless on the raised slab and whirl around to face the pair of fucking skeleton guards that just fucking broke--killed--your--

…

...

The rest of the fight isn’t important.

What’s important is you survive. That your path leads you back to your makeshift workshop in your living room, glass and metal in your hands, trying desperately to pull shit back together with the dying hope that you can salvage your auto-responder’s programming from the remains.

It’s not like you have a fucking backup.

A backup wouldn’t mean anything anyway.

He’s--

Fuck.

Maybe it was a stupid practice to not keep a physical copy of his code elsewhere. Keep his core program somewhere else. Just in case. This is a scenario you both had argued over many, many times, always leading back to the ethics and philosophical framing of trapping yet another copy of yourself somewhere. Inactive and alone, on the sheer chance of a just in case. Would it even be him, if you removed or copied him from that one single chip from whence you’d initially activated him?

He’d adamantly refused, of course, and you’d felt guiltily responsible enough for him and his situation that you’d tabled the discussion.

As infuriating as he was, he was still alive. He did have a right to his own choices.

You shut off his network access.

Or he was--

No.

You locked him out of nearly everything.

No.

You refused to listen, so wrapped up in your own fucking feelings.

You don’t--

He would have died entirely alone. All for a petty little argument.

You refuse to accept it.

And now you have to live with the fucking consequences.

...what are you going to tell Roxy?

You found the chip, at least. In the wreckage. It looked whole. The protective casing surrounding it was dented and crushed along the edge that made removing it for inspection downright impossible if you didn’t want to further damage the interior workings. Your hands are shaking as you clean out the debris from the micro data transfer point, ignoring, as you always do, the ghost of a blood splatter your brain tries to fill in for you. Cleaning that up had been one of the first things you did. It’d corrode the component, otherwise. It doesn’t stop you from remembering it was there.

It’d taken too long for your face to stop bleeding. You rub your eyes, careless of the scabbed over wounds that just barely missed irreparably damaging your ocular organs. The pain still pulses under your skin. A constant presence since you pulled the shards of glass out of your face. Your game-constructed dreamself healed that shit faster than your original one would have, but it still isn’t right. Isn’t normal. What should be nothing more than fading lines by now are angry raised ridges, the shadows of which peek out from beneath your shades. Likely invisible to most, they are obvious to you whenever you look in the mirror. A reminder.

Your guilt, maybe, manifesting for the world to see.

But that didn’t matter, not really. What’s one more thing to hate yourself for? It’s not like it’ll change anything. You’re too stubborn and rigid to change. Besides, there’s no point when he’s--

None of that. You suck in a breath. In for four. Hold. Out for seven.

You don’t know that. Your free hand lands on the cable sitting innocently next to your monitor, fingers hooking around it like jerky claws as you drag it towards you. You take one last look, squinting through your backup pair of shades--and then pushing them up in your hair because even if the light strains your eyes you can’t do shit if there’s still debris in the port.

Okay. All clear. The lenses settle back on your nose--too light, lacking the weight and presence your broken set did, tricked out as they’d been--but you click the connector cable into the data point and push away from the clear space on your workbench, pulling up in front of your monitor instead.

The diagnostics are simple ones. Pinging the connection. Searching for indexed files. Searching for--

Well, you don't want a bunch of corrupted data, but even that would be better than nothing at all. Nothing would mean the chip was probably crushed into unsalvageable pieces in the depths of its casing.

Either that or a busted connector. Which would mean you’d have to risk breaking through the casing anyway. Which you don’t want to do.

It’s a moot consideration anyway, because the console eventually finishes its search and lights up in lines and lines of white on black, listing files and indexes. Thank god. You navigate the directory, nervously noticing the number of unreadable filenames and broken links. You check through several more harmless methods--unsecured folders and chat logs if you remember the paths correctly--only to find some of them eerily empty or unreadable.

Christ, you don’t know if you’ll feel better or worse if you find out he’s still kicking but missing half his functions. Or memory. Wouldn’t that effectively be a lobotomy?

You pull up Pesterchum, opening the memo you’d had open earlier. Looking back at the red and orange text from your childish snark off makes you feel sick. A big ol’ heaping glob of guilt roiling in your gut.

You’re an asshole.

Now isn’t the time to indulge in gratuitous self-flagellation.The wired connection should bypass the fact that he has no broadcasting capabilities. (Because you shut them off)

(d)TT: AR. (d)TT: Earth to Hal. (d)TT: Houston’s commands have just come in, they need you to compile a report on all the reasons your system operator is an idiot. (d)TT: Because at this point I think I deserve it.

You don’t think he’d be able to resist an open season like that. (note to self: thank alex for the dialogue)

But he does. Or at least that’s what you tell yourself when the minutes tick by without any lines of red text springing across the screen

(d)TT: Do you remember that time you told me to stop being a dumbass and I ignored you? (d)TT: This is the part where you say I told you so.

Time drags on. It's infuriating. You can almost hear it inside your head. Echoing. Even if you know the only clocks you have are digital and therefore make no more sound than your computer does, humming away.

(D)TT: Please?

…

The pit in your gut yawns wide before you. This was it. You might have to actually face the facts. You aren't--aren't like Jake. You can't delude yourself into thinking that everything will be alright if you just put on a cheerful attitude and hope for it to be true.

He might be gone.

Really gone.

You find his core file, but it's inaccessible remotely. Even your overrides don't do shit. You can't do anything from here. You can't break it open. You should just throw in the towel. The deed is done. You hold the shattered glass from the display in the palm of your hand, picking it up from where you'd set several chunks on your desk, some of which you’d had to dig out of your face.

It should be a relief, really. You two had never gotten along. Even before he started pushing your limits and you retaliated in an ever escalating war of bullshit. The world only needs one Dirk Strider. One of you would inevitably end up killing the other, seeing your flaws reflected back at you so clearly. In the path to perfection, isn’t it the flaws that must be eliminated?

Broken glass cuts into your palm as you squeeze your fist around the shard, bright red blood dribbling down the fractal edges, gleaming in the bright overhead lights of your workstation.

You’ve thought about it before. Of course you have. You’ve thought about letting yourself fall on your own sword before, wielded by your own hand, and he’s an even easier target. Everything you hate about yourself, bundled up in one nice neat little digital package, staring you literally in the face. Inescapable. Uncontrollable. You’ve thought about taking that reinforced steel and glass and twisting until it breaks.

But that’s all it was. A thought. Because he’s your responsibility.

Christ on a fucking cracker, he’s a pain in your ass but you didn’t want him dead.

You can't just leave it. Even if the chances are small, what do you have to lose? You can't look Roxy in the face (or even at her text, you’re already ignoring several messages from her because what the fuck do you say?) if you don't try every possible option, and there's one, no, two options left as you see it right now.

He was designed to predict and respond to your thought patterns above all else. The connection works, being able to navigate the directory affirms that. If the function that connected to Pesterchum was inaccessible then maybe you could get through some other way.

You just have to build a brand new interface around that busted casing and get some fucking neural interfaces up and running. If you know nothing else, it’s that for better or for worse, you can’t block out your own damned thoughts.

You plunge into your work, because that’s all you can do right now.

It’s almost a new day--although what exactly comprises a day at this point is arbitrary since everything is just shifting shades of green--when you finally pry yourself away and take a break, stretching your stiff back and rubbing your palms into your strained eyes. You can’t wear your shades, or turn down the lights, when dealing with components so small. The constant vigilance is wearing on you, a constant state of fatigue where one wrong move could render a part unusable and require you to start the process all over again. The only reason you’re even stopping right now is because you’re getting careless.

Your fingers ache under the brightly colored cutie mark stamped bandaids, the tips red and blistering from where your hand slipped and brought them into contact with the soldering iron. They’ll heal.

In for four.

Hold.

Out for seven.

You can do this.

Jane checks in once it’s something closer to a respectable time. She always does, you can count on it like clockwork. The pings from Pesterchum on your desktop drag you away from your workstation--slowly coming together--and you realize you never responded to her--yesterday. The messages of concern are still sitting pretty in their baby blues as you reluctantly click the window open.

GG: Now what’s this I hear about you going off on some madcap adventure over there Mr. Strider? GG: Your auto-responder was quite put out by your actions! Demanded I make it my business to grab you by the collar and tell you off, as it were. GG: I understand you might need some space at the moment, but do let me know if I can stop by at any time. You know I’m always here to talk if you need it. I’ll even bring your favorite cookies! GG: I’ll refrain from shaking you despite your auto-responder’s direct request. (d)TT is idle! GG: Oh bother.

It’s the newer messages that prompted the recent pings, time-stamped as they were with the current date and time, several minutes ago.

GG: Dirk, you know I don’t like meddling in your affairs, but I’ve heard neither hide nor hair from either of you all night! Don’t make me dig out my magnifying glass and track you down. GG: At least let me know you’re safe. (d)TT: I’m alive. GG: Oh thank heavens! That’s good. I’ll admit I’ve been beside myself with worry when you didn’t respond, not even through your auto-responder. Between the two of you I had thought it was quite impossible to go radio silent! (d)TT: I’ve just been buried in an important project all night. I appreciate the offer of a visit, but I think I need to get this done. GG: Oh that’s quite all right, we can wait until you’re ready. I’m just relieved to hear you’re safe! GG: Are you and AR fighting again? Is that what that was all about? (d)TT: You could say that. GG: Don’t you think this is all a bit silly? He can be a handful I'll grant you that, but likely no worse than you would be in that situation as far as I understand it. (d)TT: I’m dealing with it the best I can, Jane. GG: Well, make sure you take care of yourself while you do! Have you had breakfast yet? (d)TT: ...no. GG: Dinner, at least? (d)TT: Despite the fact that I don’t necessarily need to eat, I assure you I have eaten something substantial in the last 24 hours. GG: That’s only because I nagged you into doing it yesterday! Honestly, Dirk, you might not need to, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t! It’s the principle of the matter! Taking care of yourself is as much a mind-set as it is a series of actions, and it’s something you have a history of slacking about, mister!

Too tired and sick to argue back, you promise you’ll look for something, and pack yourself away from the computer to do so, allowing your Pesterchum status to revert to idle. It’s a brief diversion, you don’t have much aside from some cookies that probably went stale since you got them the last time you visited Jane a month ago, and the remnants of your preserved food stash that you’ve barely touched since the body you inhabit isn’t necessarily organic after you sacrificed your original human meatsuit on the altar of fucking time-travel in order to save your friends. Being a dreamself has some perks and being able to ignore a lot of the usual maintenance is one of the more convenient ones.

You crack open a can of black beans and let yourself indulge in a sulk, folding yourself into the corner where the two walls meet on your bed. Except you can’t properly get your sulk on because your eyes keep getting drawn to your desktop, and the workstation you have set up beside it.

This state of affairs lasts maybe five minutes before you fuck off to the roof because you can’t stand looking at it. Being in the same room and doing nothing while your work taunts you. The fucked up green and red sky and swirling clouds with its constant, distant lightning storms dancing between the shadows of ruined buildings was preferable to this.

In half an hour your government assigned break is over--you dutifully report in with Miss Crocker that you have, indeed, consumed something, even if you don’t tell her that you had thrown half of it away because you just feel like your vestigial and unnecessary stomach is doing acrobatic kickflips off all kinds of handles--and you put that damn nose back to the grind-stone. You'll be a sphinx by the time you're done with this.

Roxy, predictably, is the next one to interrupt you. Not that she ever really stopped interrupting you. You’re running on almost 36 hours since you started this damn project--you can’t just alchemize a new set because you can’t be certain the ‘ideal’ mind-reading shades would match dot for dot the specialized infrastructure you need--by the time you finally allow yourself to scroll through her messages. At least she seemed to have talked to Jane, so she doesn’t think you are dead dead, just sulking over Jake and maybe some tiff with AR. You shoot her a reassurance that you’re just elbows deep in shit--you don’t want to put someone else in the situation you’ve been in--even if you don’t really have the spoons to talk to anyone right now. You don’t peek into the second window, one with many more notifications. Those aren’t addressed to you.

She doesn’t ask you why AR isn’t responding to her. She’s always been thoughtful about that. Keeping you two seperate despite the fact that you both use the same handle. It makes it easier this time. You don’t have to lie. You don't want to tell her the truth.

You glance between the archived conversation saved on your Pesterchum, and the half-finished casing lying beside you, and you know in the cold cockles of your heart, you don’t want to have to tell her he’s dead.

Three days. It takes you that much of almost non-stop working before you have a potentially viable product.

You don’t talk to Jake. You don’t even send him a single message during that time.

You don’t know if you should be hurt or resigned to the fact that he was the only one of your--admittedly limited sample size--friends who didn’t bother to check in with you at all.

The shades lay folded on the desk in front of you, looking nothing so much as brand spanking new. New display pane. New receptors built into the temple-tips.You tested that shit before you’d installed the final piece and sealed it up. These puppies pick up your brain easier than the old set ever had, mere microseconds of input lag. You’ve learned a lot of shit since you’d started three and a half years ago; especially about optimizing and refining your alchemizations of each individual components. Almost nothing about the interior workings and design infrastructure actually resemble your original pair, aside from the crushed casing housing the memory chip, and you’d done the best that you could to shore up the connections, which remained in remarkably good shape, shiny and gold and almost like new. Shimmering in the light as you looked it over that one last time.

It’s buried in the guts of this new set now. You’ll have to disassemble shit if this doesn’t work.

You’ll have bigger problems than that if it doesn’t work.

All that’s left is to drag him out.

The neural receptors settle against your skin as you place the shades on your nose, and suck in a deep, deliberately steady breath. Your gambit is perhaps a cruel one, but it should get him to respond. You flick the proverbial switch, feeling the metal warm and hum against your face as the opaque displays go transparent, the boot menu appearing and scrolling through the initial load processes. You only release that captured lungful of air when it ends, successfully, flickering into your default display set up, which is great, because it meant it managed to read the saved preference files on that miniaturized drive. No window pops open to greet you however, to jeer at you for taking your sweet ass time and boast about how he could’ve had it done in half.

You close your eyes and think pointedly. If he’s there…You remember the first command you used to activate him, all those years ago.

Tell me about the Auto-Responder.

A crackle of energy rushes through you, and for the briefest of moments you worry you didn’t seal and insulate the casing properly. That something had gone wrong.

But only for a moment, because after that you don’t worry about anything anymore.

#homestuck #homestuck au #haltier dirk #dirk strider #hal strider #lil hal #homestuck fanfic #jane crocker #I forgot how much I loved the narration here #and I couldn't salvage a lot of it #but the pesterlogs will look familiar haha #fic: ersatz #director's cut

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