Chapter Text
When Dirk Strider shows up on your doorstep with his deadpan expression and that absurd puppet propped up on his shoulder, you know that you would be well within your rights to slam the door right in his face. You should, really.
Unfortunately, you're not the sort of man who goes around slamming doors in people's faces, no matter how much they deserve it. Or at least, that's the excuse you give yourself for why you reluctantly step aside and let him into your living room. You motion him to sit on the armchair and take a seat on the couch across from him.
You don't offer him anything to drink. Drinks are for guests you actually want in your home, not for disreputable acquaintances who showed up on your doorstep uninvited.
Before Dirk can say anything, you fix him with a stern glare. "Mr. Strider, I want to make one thing clear from the start: if you're looking for information about Dave, I can't help you."
"Sure, whatever," he says, leaning back carelessly in his chair.
"I'm serious. You have no right to have anything to do with that boy anymore, and I have no intention of allowing you to interfere with his life."
He tilts his head slightly towards the ceiling in a way that suggests that he's rolling his eyes behind his glasses. "Man, I got it. No asking after the whelp. That's not what I'm here for anyway."
Your blood boils in your veins for a moment. You take a steadying breath. "Then, Mr. Strider, with all due respect —" (which, you think in the privacy of your own head, is very little) "— why are you here?"
He hums thoughtfully, tilting his head as if he's the one assessing you.
"You're a business dude, right?" he says finally. "Finance or some shit like that?"
"I'm an accountant, yes."
"Yeah, that. I wanted your opinion on a new business venture of mine."
You just look at him, unamused. There is absolutely no way that this man came all the way to Washington just to ask you to do some light accounting for him. He gazes back, showing no hint that he's anything but serious.
You decide that the best strategy for now is to act as if you're taking his request at face value. If he wants to get to his real point, he's free to do so at any time. "Mr. Strider," you say, "I'm not a freelancer. If you want professional advice, I would suggest that you hire a proper firm to look over your financials for you."
"Yeah. Hm." He stretches his neck. Lil Cal's head drops down onto his shoulder, mouth falling open in a lolling grin. "My shit ain't exactly aboveboard. Dunno how the suits at some big corporation would take it."
You raise your eyebrows, gesture at your own attire: your dress shirt, your tie. "Who do you think I am, if not a corporate suit?"
He looks you up and down, gaze seeming to linger on your chest, your biceps (though of course it's impossible to tell for sure behind those ridiculous shades). "I think you're a man who's not afraid to get down and dirty when it comes to it."
You're hardly so naive as to miss his innuendo, though you don't dignify it with any outward response. "Nevertheless, I'm afraid I can't help you."
"You sure? I think you're gonna want to get in on the ground floor of this one. It's a real growth opportunity."
"Am I sure that I don't want to enter into a dubiously-legal business partnership with the least trustworthy man I've ever met in my life? Yes, quite sure."
He holds your gaze for a few more seconds, then shrugs minutely. "Eh. Worth a shot." Then, in the blink of an eye, he's out of his chair and standing in the doorway. "Anyway. If you ain't gonna help, I got shit to take care of. Code to write. Facilities to tour. You know how it is."
He does that irritating trick where he flashsteps behind himself, barely perceptible, to puppet Lil Cal into giving a little wave. "See ya 'round, Egbert."
With that, he's out the door before you can even respond, leaving you with nothing but questions and the memories of an apocalypse that never was.
Seven years ago, the world was supposed to end. And then, abruptly, it didn't.
You still don't know why.
Four children were set to play a game that would bring about the end of the world, as well as give rise to a new beginning — instigators and saviors in one. One of the four was your daughter, June, though she went by a different name at the time. You never knew many details about what the game would entail. Just enough to make you worried. Just enough to make you proud.
You met, a few times, the guardians of the other would-be players, to make what arrangements you could for your children. The beautiful scientist who appeared as she pleased and vanished without a trace. The dashing old gentleman from across the sea, before his tragic demise.
And one Dirk Strider, intense and focused, always in the right place at the right time to ensure that what "should" happen, would happen. He cared about nothing else, you recall. He had no small talk to offer you, no well-wishes for your child. The game was everything to him. He was destined never to play it, but was determined to win nonetheless.
(You didn't stop to wonder, at the time, what sort of guardian such a man might be for his charge. You wish now that you had.)
And then, after the years of preparation and worry, the fateful day came, and... nothing. No game arrived in the mail. No meteors fell from the sky. June went to sleep on the night of her 13th birthday and woke the next day to an Earth still whole and unspoiled.
You didn't understand what caused this upheaval, but you were grateful. Your child would avoid the hardships and tragedy you had thought would come to her. She would get to enjoy her childhood with nothing more than the normal tribulations of adolescence to deal with. You would be allowed the privilege to watch her grow into a beautiful and brave young woman.
It was some time before you learned that the other children weren't so lucky in their circumstances.
Of the three, Rose was the most fortunate, though it was rough going at first. Roxy confessed to you, later, about how she nearly drank herself to death, in the days after the end that didn't happen. How she woke up in the hospital to the furious face of the daughter she'd nearly orphaned, and knew in that moment that she needed help. She's been sober for six years, now. You're proud of her.
Jade's situation was far stranger. It turned out that she had been living half-feral on a deserted island for years with only her dog and her grandfather's dead body for company; that she'd gone more feral than ever after the game didn't happen, after all of her prophetic dreams dissolved into nothing around her. You became aware of it when June confessed the whole thing to you, sobbing out of worry for her friend's increasingly bizarre behavior.
The mission to extract her was complicated, with issues ranging from the remoteness of the island to Jade's ambiguous citizenship status. The biggest obstacle, though, was Jade's own dog, who took weeks to be persuaded to stop warping you back home out of fear that you'd harm his beloved master. You'll always be grateful to Roxy for financing the multiple expeditions to the island and covering the legal fees for the complicated adoption process.
In the end, it was all worth it, because you came away from it blessed with a second daughter, brilliant and strong. It took some time for her to get back on her feet, and she never fully adjusted to life in the suburbs, but you were willing to indulge her and Becquerel's tendency to roam as long as she kept you informed of where she was and kept up with her studies. She and June now attend the same college, and the tales Jade comes back with about her latest experiments with the nuclear reactor always leave you in awe.
And then there was Dave, whose home life, you eventually came to learn, had never been anything but dire, due entirely to the man who dared to call himself his brother — the man so obsessed with winning the game that he didn't care what he broke in the process.
After the game failed to happen, Dirk apparently became even more erratic, vanishing for weeks at a time, and then, eventually, abandoning Dave entirely, leaving him nothing but an apartment full of pornography and a pile of debit cards for bank accounts containing more money than he could ever possibly spend in his life. As if money was all a child needed from a guardian.
(From the one time you heard Dave touch on the subject in his roundabout way, you gather that even the abandonment was an improvement over what had come before.)
The best that can be said about Dirk is that he didn't contest it when Roxy petitioned to become Dave's guardian, though the swiftness and silence with which he returned the signed paperwork relinquishing guardianship must surely have been painful for Dave in itself.
Those legal documents were the last communication any of you ever had from Dirk Strider.
Until today.
Two days later, your doorbell rings again.
You're only half-surprised when you answer it to find Dirk standing there again, Lil Cal propped against his hip with long arms wrapped around his torso, like a parody of a toddler.
"What do you think about puppets?" he says with no preamble.
"Excuse me?"
"Puppets. You know. Hand puppets. Marionettes. Dummies like my main man Lil Cal here. Puppets." At the mention of Lil Cal's name, Dirk puppets the dummy's head around to gaze at you with its empty eyes.
"Mr. Strider — "
"It's Dirk. Or you can just call me Bro, bro."
"Mr. Strider," you repeat. Dirk cocks an eyebrow, but doesn't raise any further objection. "Is there some reason you've come all the way here to ask me about puppets?"
"Can't a dude make conversation?" he says.
"While standing on the doorstep of an acquaintance you haven't seen for years?"
He shrugs. "We could be talking inside if you'd let me in."
"Mr. Strider. Why are you here."
He stares at you impassively for a few moments. Finally, he says, "Long as I'm in town for work, I figured I'd drop by. You gonna let me in or what?"
You look at him for another couple seconds, then sigh. Without a word, you turn and walk back inside, leaving the door open behind you for him to follow you in. You sit down in your usual spot without bothering to tell him to make himself comfortable. You don't offer him a drink.
He doesn't react to your show of impoliteness. You're not sure if it would even occur to him to expect niceties like that, nor to notice their absence.
"So what sort of work brings you to this neck of the woods?" you prod, packing your pipe with tobacco.
Dirk flashsteps disconcertingly around your living room, checking out the decor. Maybe you should have asked him to sit after all. "Thought you didn't want to hear about my business ventures," he says.
"Maybe I'm making conversation," you say.
That gets you a brief exhale that from someone else might have qualified as a snort. "Well. Long as we're making conversation, I notice you never answered my question about puppets." A deflection. You allow it for now. You doubt you're going to get any more information out of this man than he's willing to give anyway.
"I can't say I've ever spent much time thinking about puppets." You light your pipe without asking whether it's okay with him. If he has any objections to smoking, he should have thought of that before he came to your home uninvited.
"Hm. I'm a little surprised," he says. "Seems like they'd be right up your old-timey alley. Never watched Howdy Doody as a kid?"
You're a bit too young to have been raised on Howdy Doody. But then again, you're too young to have grown up with vaudeville either, so perhaps he has a bit of a point.
"I suppose puppets just never happened to catch my interest," you say. He doesn't reply.
You sit back in your chair and puff your pipe, watching Dirk flit around the room. He's given no verbal reaction to your smoking, but from the way his afterimages trail around the clouds of smoke rather than through them, you think he probably isn't a fan. So much the better.
"What do you think of puppets, then?" you ask, after you've had enough of watching him dodge your smoke.
"Love 'em. Can't get enough of 'em. I'd marry a puppet if I could." He says it in the same bored monotone as he says everything else, as if it were all a big joke, but you can't imagine that his feelings about puppets are anything but sincere. The man's practically dedicated his entire life to the things. He carts a ventriloquist dummy around with him like a baby and treats it with more affection than he ever showed to his own brother.
"I fuck 'em too," he adds offhandedly. "Ever hear of smuppets? I invented them. My own design. Specially tailored for maximum plush pleasure. You ever want one, I can hook you up. Give you the friends and family discount."
He's clearly trying to shock you, but to what end, you can't imagine. You refuse to rise to the bait. "No thank you, Mr. Strider."
He tilts his head at you, looks you up and down. "You sure? You'd look damn good with a foam proboscis in your ass, dick firmly ensconced in the pillowy cleft of a velvety rump."
"I'll thank you to stop voicing your sexual fantasies aloud to me, Mr. Strider."
He considers you blankly for another moment. "Just sayin'," he shrugs. He turns back to the Fred Astaire lamp he's been examining. "I got other puppets you might be interested in too," he adds. "Don't have to be sexy ones. You like classy dudes? I got all the classy dude puppets. Ventriloquist dummies all done up in three piece suits with little bow ties. Dapper as fuck. They'd fit right in around here."
You take the time to picture such a puppet sitting on your shelves alongside your figurines. Dirk's not wrong: the aesthetic has a certain appeal. "I'll think about it," you say.
Something about the pattern in which Dirk is darting around your room changes at that, and you get the strangest impression that he's surprised by your answer.
The next time you see Dirk is when you get home from a grocery store run to find him darting around your yard, sword drawn. Adrenaline spikes into your system until you realize that he's merely doing some sort of training routine, using Lil Cal as a sparring partner of sorts. It's a bizarre but remarkable sight, the way he moves the puppet smoothly from form to form, its floppy glove wrapped around the hilt of the sword, while at the same time weaving his own body through the fray, somehow parrying the puppet's blows with the selfsame sword held in his own hand.
It's riveting enough that you're tempted to sit and watch the show a while longer. But this sort of display will alarm your neighbors, and you know from unfortunate experience that they'll only put up with so much strangeness before complaining to the homeowner's association.
You get out of the car and close the door firmly to draw his attention. "Put the sword away, Mr. Strider," you call. "I won't have weapons drawn on my property."
Dirk comes to a halt and catches Lil Cal smoothly in his arms. The corner of his mouth twitches down, but his sword vanishes back into his strife deck. "Don't know how you expect to protect your home if you won't allow weapons," he says.
"My home security strategies are my business, not yours," you say, popping open the trunk and lifting out some of the bags of groceries.
"What, you planning on throwing pies at burglars?" he says, following you back to the house. You notice that he makes no offer to help carry the groceries in.
"You joke, but sometimes a well-placed pie is all that you need. I find that a little humor can help de-escalate a tense situation." You open the front door and make your way to the kitchen, allowing Dirk to follow you inside.
"Yeah, don't think I'll be hiring you as a bodyguard anytime soon." He leans against the kitchen doorframe, watching as you set the groceries down on the counter. You can smell the sweat of his workout on him, heady and masculine.
"Then I suppose it's a good thing I'm not in the bodyguarding business," you say, setting the bags on the counter and looking them over. "Now. Would you bring the rest of the groceries in from the car?"
He tilts his head at you from where he's leaning against the kitchen doorframe. "Is that how you treat a guest? Make him do your chores for you?"
"Are you a guest? I don't recall inviting you," you say, starting to remove the refrigerated items from the bags.
"And yet here I am."
"Yes, here you are." You set the milk down for a moment and turn fully toward him, crossing your arms. "So. Are you going to explain why you're here, or are you going to fetch my groceries for me?"
He holds your gaze for a moment, then in the next moment, he's gone. You hear the front door slam after him.
"That's what I thought," you mutter, turning back to the refrigerator.
Dirk is back within seconds. He dumps the rest of your bags in the middle of the floor then slouches back against the wall, puppeting Lil Cal to wipe a hand over his forehead as if wiping sweat from his brow. A head of lettuce rolls across the linoleum.
You fix Dirk with a Look. "Normally it's considered polite to treat other people's property with the same care that you'd treat your own."
"Your point?" he says blankly.
It occurs to you that this may in fact be how he treats his own property as well. You sigh and lift the rest of the bags to the counter. He stands and watches you silently for a few minutes as you begin to put things away. You don't bother asking him to help with that. Who knows where your food would end up if you left it to him.
As you put a box of cake mix into the cabinet, he speaks up. "She's an alien, you know."
"Excuse me?"
"Betty Crocker," he says, nodding minutely towards the cake mix. "She's an alien. Big mean momma from outer space."
"I didn't take you for a conspiracy theorist, Mr. Strider."
"Man. We spent years prepping our kids for a game about breeding universe frogs, and now you're balking at a little extraterrestrial activity? I'm disappointed, Egbert."
"Oh, that wasn't what I meant," you say. "I'm well aware that Betty Crocker wasn't human. I was referring to your use of the present tense. Her death was well-documented."
He stares at you thoughtfully for a moment, and you think that your response may have surprised him. But when he continues, it's as smoothly as if you hadn't said anything unexpected at all. "Damn, even you got taken in by that farce of a funeral? Think about it. Those fuckin' horns of hers wouldn't even have fit into that coffin."
"If you know details like that about her personal appearance, you may have me at an advantage. I never met her in person, only heard second-hand accounts."
"Nah, I never met her either, thank Christ. Don't think I'd be standing here today if I had. But I got my sources." He shifts Lil Cal so that one floppy arm is draped around his broad shoulders, porcelain cheek resting in the crook of Dirk's neck. An oddly intimate pose.
You shake off your unease. "If you really think she's still alive, why do you think she allowed control of her company to pass into the hands of Mr. Harley?"
"Yeah, that was a weird period in the company's history, I'll give ya that. Dunno if it was part of a long game on the batterwitch's part, or if he somehow managed to wrest control from her. Wouldn't put it past him, that dude was somethin' else." There's a note of admiration in his voice that you wouldn't have expected. "But the thing is, Harley's been dead for years. So who's running Crockercorp now? Sure as fuck ain't his granddaughter. Pretty sure it ain't you, either."
"What makes you think I would ever have been in contention for such a position?" you ask blandly, stashing toothpaste and toothbrushes from your grocery run in your sylladex to take to the bathroom later.
"Really?" he says flatly. "Ain't no way I believe that you know what she was but don't know who she was to your own mother."
You're not surprised that you weren't able to bluff him, but the impulse to downplay this aspect of your family history is automatic. You've never enjoyed the spotlight that it brings. "My mother and I were cut out of the Crocker family tree decades ago," you say. "We inherited nothing but the few recipes that my mother had memorized by heart." It's your standard response to such inquiries, and has the benefit of being almost entirely true.
"Shame. Woulda been interesting to see what direction a dude like you would take that company. Bet you'd be a force to be reckoned with."
"No, no. That's not the life for me. I'm just a family man, Mr. Strider. I have no interest in running a multinational corporation."
"Fuck, really? You got no desire to play with all the alien technology they got hidden in their labs? Indulge in some light world conquest?"
"I take it that you wouldn't be so circumspect in my shoes."
"Ha. Sounds right up my alley, don't it? Capturing the hearts and minds of the public by subverting a beloved, down-home brand. Sending out Crockercorp drones to force people to fuck for my amusement. Lording over a baked goods empire isn't really my style, though. I'd want to go in a different direction. Repurpose the tech, pivot into the entertainment industry. Stage some robot deathmatches and rap battles. Get a hot piece of ass to dance for the screen, distract the populace from what's really goin' on behind the scenes. Yeah. If I were gonna take over, that's how I'd do it."
You feel that you've lost the thread of this conversation. "Put a lot of thought into this, have you?"
"Nah," he says, staring off into the distance. "Just thinkin' about what could have been." You have no idea how to respond to that.
In response to your silence, he gives you a strange lopsided grin. It looks unnatural on his face. "So what do you think? You've heard my evil plans. If I tried to take over the world, would you stop me?"
You scoff. "That presumes that I think you're capable of taking over the world in the first place."
That startles an almost-laugh out of him. "Damn. Owned." The barest hint of an upturn that's left around the corners of his mouth looks far more genuine than the rictus he'd been wearing before. It's an unprecedented display of emotion, and you suddenly yearn to capture this moment in a bottle so that you can hold it in your hands, turning it and shaking it until you can see why this, of all things, is what Dirk would want to hear from you. But you sense that if you press any further, he'll close right off again.
So instead, you steer the conversation back to the original topic. "So. You think Betty Crocker herself has returned and reclaimed control of her own company?"
Dirk shrugs, his face already back in its usual expression of flat indifference. "I think it's a possibility. Though I'll admit, things ain't going exactly how I'd expect if she was in charge. Think I'm still missing a piece."
"Or perhaps," you counter, "the situation is exactly as it seems — the Betty Crocker company is now nothing more than an ordinary corporation run by an ordinary CEO. Often, the simplest explanation is the best."
"Fuck, Egbert," he says. "Since when has anything in our lives ever been simple?"