Chapter Text
Aggressively pirouetting off the handle as soon as you're all out of immediate danger.
Dirk steps through the portal.
The moment he does, there’s a sickening pull in the pit of his stomach. Existence itself stretches around him, and bends and wraps in all the wrong ways. After what must only be a few seconds but damn well feels like seven fuckin’ years, the big frog in the sky figures it’s had enough fun horsing around. Matter coagulates into physical form again and gravity is reinstated without warning. His legs give out underneath him.
He tries to focus on the blurry figures around him, but his head is spinning. He shuts his eyes against the sensation of being thrown into the multiverse’s most malicious tumble dryer, but his stomach must have decided to take a day trip down to his heels. His legs hurt, a dull pain pulsing behind his kneecaps, and he realises he’s collapsed to his knees. He didn’t intend to get up close and personal with the dirt, but that’s where he’s at right now, and he’s abruptly overwhelmed by the urgent concern of curbing his body’s need to retch all over the fucking place oh God he’s going to be sick. Fuck.
Slowly, effortfully, he pushes the air out of his lungs. Holds, breathes in. Exhales again. The contents of his stomach (when was even the last time he ate? The passage of time is devoid of meaning.) remain blessedly inside of it, and the tremor in his limbs subsides. Take it to the bank, boys, operation “Not Throwing Up in Front of All the People He Knows” is an overwhelming success. He would pat himself on the shoulder if he didn’t think the motion would immediately undo his hard-won success, so he settles on just—breathing.
It takes some time, but his head clears.
A light breeze cools the sweat on his forehead. It’s warm, sort of humid, and heavy with the smell of damp soil. It’s not as salty as in Houston, or as… sterile and unnatural as in the Incipisphere. He lets the taste linger on his tongue.
The next thing he notices is that the surface under his hands is soft and sticky, almost clay-like. His hands have sunk to his knuckles in it. He wants to wipe them off really badly.
Once his vertigo finally calms down, he opens his eyes and looks around.
He was the last one to step through the portal, so everyone else is already around him and looking about as terrible as he feels. He sees Jake’s alternate universe grandmother—her name is Jade, he recalls from his conversation with Dave. And she has dog ears. This is fine. Anyway, she’s the first on her feet, and he guesses either her Space powers give her some sort of edge or she’s the freakin’ Highlander from cult classic movie of the same title, ‘cause she sure as hell doesn't seem even slightly fazed by their little wormhole joyride. He’d even venture to say that she looks chipper, a sharp contrast to the sickly shades of green everyone else is sporting.
The turtleneck-wearing troll scrambles to his feet and immediately starts wobbling all sorts of unsteady-like. He manages, somehow, to hobble over to Dave, who's still on all fours but doesn’t look much worse for wear. A small amount of tension leaves Dirk’s body at the sight of his—friend? Brother? Might as well call him that. In his head, at least. Having a painfully honest and cathartic conversation mere minutes before a high-stakes back to back fight against overpowered interdimensional game constructs from hell warrants some sort of familial attachment, he figures. Hopes. Right?
He swallows past the lump in his throat. He’ll—he’ll figure that out. Conclusively. At a later date.
Dirk wipes his hands on his tights. The God Tier asshole pants gobble it right up, the fabric remaining as blemish-free as ever even though the mud is gone from his hands.
Roxy is the next one to stand up, and Dirk’s relief is so intense he almost starts gross sobbing on the spot. Roxy is all right, and Jane and Jake are next to her, pale and shaken but alive, and it suddenly dawns on him that—despite everything, despite him being a fucking moron, miscalculating everything spectacularly, and not having the slightest goddamn clue what was happening at any given second—everyone made it here in one piece.
Here happens to be a low hill at the edge of a dense forest. As far as he can tell, it’s spring—or this new planet’s analogue of spring—and Dirk hasn’t ever seen so many trees in a single place before. The whisper of a stream somewhere not far off and the soft cooing and rustling coming from the forest are the only sounds besides their own laboured breathing.
Everything is quiet and perfectly at peace.
It makes his skin crawl.
Peaceful just isn’t a thing that happens to them. Not to him, anyway. He’s been lulled into dropping his guard before, into hoping that apparent safety might be the same as actual safety, only for the universe to shake its giant, amphibious head in stern celestial disapproval as it unloads the next disaster on his ass. Every instance when he’s assumed that things might actually be okay for a fucking change has ended up adding another patch to the colourful quilt of his emotional, mental, and physical trauma, and Dirk Strider’s getting altogether too toasty in here.
Something’s going to go wrong.
His muscles clench and adrenaline floods his system. A bird chirps somewhere to his right and he almost whips his sword out before his brain catches up with his fight-or-flight impulse.
He breathes out, slowly—apparently mindfulness meditation is the order of the day. Could be worse, he supposes. Maybe it was breathing exercises that he’s been missing all his life, and now everything’s going to get better forever. He’s so glad to have finally figured this one out.
He looks over at the rest of the players again. They’re gathering their bearings by now, it seems. Everyone’s on their feet—or at least getting there—and, as if under some sort of mass hypnosis, or maybe due to instinctive human mimicking behaviour (do trolls have mimicking behaviour?), they all turn to look at the portal simultaneously.
Or rather, where the portal used to be until it up and fucking vanished.
Well.
This is it, then. If anyone was getting cold feet about this whole “gods of a new universe” business, it seems their last return ticket just got put through the metaphorical shredder. This is their new home now, and it sure as hell isn’t eligible for refunds or exchanges. The customer service leaves so much to be desired that there are very angry, very white suburban moms screaming bloody murder at the staff left and right—which is shitty as fuck, actually, because the poor workforce ain’t got nothing to do with their company's ass-backwards business practice.
His eyes keep darting between the people around him. They stop on the sunglasses-wearing troll… she’s called something like Teresa? And she clearly shares his superior taste in eyewear. She’s standing very still, her entire body tense, facing the empty air where the portal used to be with an inscrutable expression. If he were to attempt to decipher it, he’d say she looked like she was about to fucking kick the air’s ass, and he already saw enough of her combat skills to have little doubt that she could do that. Frankly, he’s not sure if he’s afraid of or for her.
He stares at her stare at the air for another long second. Then, the other troll, the one with the bright red skirt, steps up to her and rests a hand on her shoulder. Dirk wonders if Teresa is going to snap at her, but instead, her shoulders slump, the tension draining out of her body like a switch flipped.
Hm. Okay.
Before he can formulate a hypothesis as to what in the goddamn, his gaze locks with Jake’s. His face’s already got an ashen tint to it, but he blanches further when their eyes meet.
Both of them look away simultaneously. Dirk feels like he accidentally ingested a big, juicy lump of lead that is now making its merry way into his bloodstream and poisoning his body from inside out. He’s going to be sick. How are they supposed to exist in the same physical space now? Their chat on the platform clearly did jack shit in terms of actually helping them fix what’s left of their relationship. Who’d have thought.
Desperate for any straws to grab before free falling the rest of the way into pure unbridled terror, he scans the rest of the group. Roxy and Jane lean into each other in a one-armed hug, talking to Calliope in hushed voices. Dave and Turtleneck Troll—Carcat or something? What even is the deal with troll names—share a look, their expressions softening into something that’s warm and gentle and entirely too intimate for Dirk’s eyes. He glances away. The rest of the Beta session players have clustered together by now, and wow, there sure are a lot of them. Humans, trolls, sprites. Calliope. The two carapacians scuttling around. He’s never really seen so many people in such close quarters before, and he’s not sure if he should go talk to any of them. Or if he should just stay here. Is he supposed to join one of the groups? He barely knows most of them, and the ones that he is familiar with seem. Occupied. How do you just—he realises he’s on the wrong side of an invisible divide. Everyone has someone to turn to, everyone’s together, and he’s just.
There.
He can’t do this.
The thought is a punch to his gut, and his artfully repressed fears and anxieties come bursting through the floodgates, and God. He’s helpless against the panic rushing into his mind. His synapses short-circuit under the onslaught of stimuli. Palms are sweating, breath erratic. He thought he could deal with this. Not dealing at all. This is too much. Too many people. Ears are buzzing. He has to—he needs—
Get the fuck out of there. Get away.
He doesn’t know where he’s going. Doesn’t care. He only stops when the pressure inside his lungs threatens to rip his chest open. He has no idea where he is—the strength drains from his body, any sort of movement suddenly unthinkable. He sinks to knees, again, and his entire body is quaking, his vision spinning. He drops his face in his hands. His throat is tight. He’s gasping for breath, trying to force some oxygen into his system.
He’s been too horrified for too long, and now all of it washes over him at once, every single bad thing that happened over the course of the last months demanding his undivided attention immediately.
The memories come in flashes. The trickster episode, with his friends acting like cackling, maniacal caricatures of themselves, loud and obnoxious and saying all that —bullshit that he knew was juju-induced nonsense but still left an acrid taste in his mouth. The aftermath of that, the brief moments on his quest bed—oppressive silence, Roxy with her back turned to him. The explosion. Dying, only to come around to see the Condesce, looming, incomprehensible, terrifying. He thought he was done for, then, even before Jade zeroed in on him, snarling, eyes glowing behind her glasses, something like electricity crackling over her skin.
Her punch knocked him straight out of the Incipisphere. He hadn’t thought he could get hit that hard and still live, keep falling, dizzy with pain and confusion until he was an outsider staring down on his helpless floating form, caught in a bad dream of infinite nothing, dark whispers crawling over his skin like invisible tendrils. Dirk shudders and heaves, plunged back into that hopelessness, the moment he well and truly realised he had no control over anything that was happening.
The feeling hasn’t left him since.
When Roxy finds him, at first he doesn't hear her over the drumming of his heart.
Her hand brushes against his right shoulder, rubs a small circle on his shoulder blade, then slides to wrap around the left one as she sinks to the ground next to him. He doesn’t turn to look at her, but the tension in his muscles recedes under her touch. Breathing slowly becomes a much more manageable task. After a while, he shifts so he’s sitting on the ground instead of kneeling. Roxy leans against him, her arm snaking around his waist.
“Those ginormous leggies made it supes difficult to catch up with you, y'know. Gave me a workout and everything,” she chastises him gently. A pang of guilt hits him square in the chest—not even twenty minutes since they’ve beaten the game, and already he’s gone and been reduced to an useless, pathetic mess. It’s laughable.
He feels a gentle squeeze to his midsection. Roxy is here. Warm against his side, grounding and familiar. She’s prattling on about—something, but he can’t really focus on her words. He just clings to the sound of her voice like it’s a lifeline. (It is.) Closing his eyes, he forces his breathing to slow down. In, then out. The indistinct background noise of Roxy’s chatter slowly comes into focus, and you really need to talk to Rosie soon she’s so much like you it’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen you’re going to love her oh did you see Jade’s fuzzy little ears they’re so adorable how did she even get those I wonder if she has a tail is that a weird thing to think about probably right. In and out. In—
“It’s over, Dirk,” Roxy says, and everything stills. “We won.”
He turns to look at her. Her eyes are tired but bright with relief, and a tentative smile curls her lips. He doesn’t manage to return it, but he rests his head on her shoulder. For the moment, that’s good enough.
It’s good enough.
They’re on their slow way back to the others when he starts turning her words over in his head. It’s not over . What’s over is that damn nightmare of a game—and yet, part of Dirk wishes it weren’t. Pretty fucking selfish of him, all things considered, but he wishes they still had a goal. An enemy to fight, the game mechanics to stick to and exploit. Without that, he feels a little bit lost.
Okay, he actually feels hella lost. All kinds of lost. With like, insane amounts of trepidation and a creeping sense of dread as a fun little bonus. He’s not sure what’s going to happen now, has no idea what’s in store for him—for any of them. How do you learn to exist outside of a constant state of fighting for your own survival, for the survival of an entire universe, of toiling against alien, incomprehensible forces? What do you do when there’s no longer any need to be on guard, or contingencies to plan for? The uncertainty makes his stomach clench.
Roxy reaches over and takes his hand.
And just like that, she is the dashing cowboy to his damsel in distress, swooping in to cut his sorry ass free from the ropes binding him to the train tracks. She scoops him up, bridal style, and carries him to safety before the anxiety train choo-choos him straight into hell. Again.
He forces his muscles to relax. This is good, he decides as he squeezes Roxy’s hand. Maybe he can get used to this. A normal life—by a rather broad definition of the word, granted—with his friends, on this planet that exists for them and because of them.
Yeah. Maybe this is all worth a shot.