Work Text:
Everything is going just according to keikaku.
(Translator's note: keikaku means plan.)
The new species is thriving, the artifacts are in place, and the new story is set to begin.
"How is your hold on the reins?" Rose asks him, as they stand together on a pillar of stone in the middle of a convenient barren wasteland.
"More tenuous by the day," Dirk admits. "It may nearly be time for the new installment."
"Will you give it up willingly and let it grow organically, when the time comes?"
"Of course," says Dirk. "I know my limits. I don't have the optimal skillset. I wouldn't be able to tell if I were pruning off important shoots. And if that happens, we'll be right back where we started."
"What you meant to say," Rose says, and if she could still smirk he knows she'd be doing it, "is that you've listened carefully to the person who does have the optimal skillset, and won't do anything stupid to fuck it up."
"What you meant to say," Dirk counters, and he can smirk, but he doesn't, "is that you're glad I listened to you, even though you only have half the optimal skillset."
"I won't argue," says Rose. "It would have been a lot easier if we had an ascended Dave."
Dirk doesn't say anything. They've talked themselves to death over "ascended Dave" by now. He knows Rose blames him for the fact that he never showed up, and Dirk has let her go on thinking that was the real plan.
In his mind, he reaches for the last wisps of narrative control and pulls.
There's a high pitched whistle, a streak of silver, then a cloud of dust billows up as something makes impact with the ground below them. Rose turns to give Dirk the flattest look he has received in his life so far.
"Speak of the devil," he intones.
"Hey y'all," says robot Dave, his eyes literal lanterns. "Been a hot minute."
Right on schedule, the gaggle of heroes from his own universe are descending now too, flying down through the atmosphere at a less brutal pace.
Dave and Rose are looking at each other, their metal faces betraying nothing.
"I don't need help," says Dirk, and the two of them swing to look at him now. "Go find Terezi."
The cogs are ticking into motion. His robot children jet off together without so much as a nod. He swells with bittersweet pride. They'll see this through, and they'll be together. As for him? It's time for the final boss battle.
He watches as Kanaya and Roxy, suspended in the air, notice and peel away from the rest of the party, following. Good, he thinks. Jane isn't with them. Neither is Jake.
That... throws him a little. He'd assumed that Jake would be the one the organic plot would choose for this; he'd set up that extremely clever wrestling heel foreshadowing and everything.
If Kanaya is gone, then that means it won't be her either. Karkat? Laughable. It could be Jade or her passenger. Lots of narrative justification there, plus the added commentary in having a final winner in their meta debate.
That particular dog girl-shaped situation alights on the dirt first, but doesn't make a move to attack yet.
"I see you've stopped running," they say. "Have you accepted your fate?"
"Yes, but not the one you mean. You were always wrong. This was supposed to be a creation story," he says to the cherub possessing Jade. "You know it deep down."
"Regardless of what it was supposed to be, it is now something new. A story of destruction. The death of Paradox Space. You must respect that, or be destroyed yourself." They are advancing on him.
"But Paradox Space hasn't been born," he says, unsheathing his sword. He can feel something happening to the narrative, hazy as it is now. It's ticking, not slow and steady like a clock, but madcap insane, like the flapper on a giant wheel. "If it's not born it cannot die. Our story is only halfway told. And I know how to tell it. I... I am the one who will become the god of a new world that everyone desires."
"You're already a god, you over-inflated pus balloon," yells Karkat. Dave has left him on the top of a stone outcrop, which he looks both angry and relieved about. "The love and adoration of a whole planet not good enough for your massive ego? You needed two?"
The ticking of the wheel hasn't stopped, so he pulls again.
"There is no such thing as love. Therefore, there's no sorrow."
Dave has joined Jade now. His face is very blank. "That doesn't make any fucking sense. Seriously, after all this time, after all the shit you pulled, that's the bullshit you have to say?"
Oh, thinks Dirk. Now that would be a story. He hadn't let himself dwell on that possibility. Dave has already killed him once before, it seemed redundant.
"You should have known," he says, "This is the man I am. You, of all people."
The wheel is slowing now, ticking against the pegs.
"Yeah well, I thought you were trying harder not to just go full on evil."
"To defeat evil, I must become a greater evil," Dirk replies, each slowing tick of the flapper vibrating in his soul.
"What evil?" asks Jade's passenger. "The end of things is simple entropy, it is nothing but neutral."
"The black hole you're trying to protect is evil. At this rate, we'll all become shitty facsimiles that scatter despair. Everyone will be saved. We have that right. I swear I'll be the one to accomplish that."
"The world I have sheltered is the only way to save everyone. Living and dead. You are lying, prince. You only wish for power, even if it means perverting the natural end."
"I told you," says Dirk. "Paradox Space hasn't been born. Our story never got to its natural end."
"And you think what, making everyone hate you is going to make for a better "story"?" Dave does finger quotes as he says it.
"I can most definitely shoulder this hate all by myself," says Dirk, and the wheel stops dead. The very last wisp of control puffs away, and it's him, alone on this rock with his sword. But there are words flowing into him from somewhere, and he lets them come. "I will deal with it alone. All the narrative problems we face, I'll come up with solutions. Judgements and executions, I'll do all of it. I'll make sure that all the hate is focused on myself alone. And it will unify the rest of you."
"Galvanize," corrects Calliope. "They didn't need unity to begin with. They were at peace without your manufactured strife."
"This is so fucking dumb," says Dave.
"I don't care what you guys think of me. I now have the power to do things my way. A revolution... With this, the narrative will no longer fall prey to irrelevance. I will be the villain."
"Congratulations, you already are one," says Dave.
Of course it would be Dave, reluctant hero Dave. Their blades clash, and it's better than Dirk could have dreamed. It's a beatdown bookend. Lord English never made a satisfying villain for Dave's story. There were no emotional stakes. A final showdown with his shitty brother? Now that will get clicks.
He swings, Dave parries. Dave sweeps low, Dirk jumps it, and is hit with a foot to the chest, thrown back into the pillar. Cracks splinter in the stone as he flips and hits it feet first, springing back at Dave.
Dave blocks, blocks, blocks again.
"Are you just going to play defense?" Dirk asks, and Dave grits his teeth, shoving with a sudden force that sends Dirk's shoulder wrenching back.
"Somehow, I still don't want to kill you," Dave mutters, taking advantage of Dirk's loss of balance to slice him in the arm, shallow and stinging.
Dirk plants his foot and twists away. Well then, he has more work to do.
The battle runs them both ragged, thrown so far across the wasteland they've lost track of everyone else, dirty and sliced up, each unable to keep the upper hand for long. Another phase would probably look cooler anyway, thinks Dirk, setting off a crackling purple fraymotif—it collides with a sudden fraymotif of Dave's own, and the whole world bleaches white.
He can feel himself unravel, disintegrate, as his soul is split and split and split over branching timelines. Perfect, he thinks, with utter sincerity.
But he does not die.
The cry of the gulls and the rush of the ocean soak the air in Dirk's tiny childhood room. He's sitting at his desk, watching one of his Bro's movies. He knows there are subliminal frames spliced in, but he isn't prepared for—
"I'm disappointed," says his Bro, right out of the screen.
"Don't think you have the right to say that," says Dirk, pretending his thirteen year old heart isn't breaking. He digs his nails into the arm of his computer chair, the brittle ancient plastic flaking easily. "You're not here to disappoint."
"I'm not disappointed in you, kid. I'm disappointed for you. You had a chance at a real future. Happiness. That's all I wanted for you. Why'd you throw it away?"
"Again, very rich coming from you. You died for your cause. I can't die for mine?"
"The thing is," says his Bro, "your kids are supposed to have it better than you did. That's the whole point."
"I don't care. I don't want kids."
The soaking blue in the room dries sunset red. Dave's in the doorway. He's tiny, and Dirk can't see his eyes, but his little fingers are tight on the doorknob.
"Kind of fucked up," he says, flat even at this age.
Bro doesn't say anything. He doesn't think he needs to.
"Kind of a fucked up thing to say, and a fucked up way to behave."
He's so small, and he's shaking imperceptibly. When did he get this backbone?
"You don't see the bigger picture," he ends up saying. "Everything I do, it's for a reason."
"Oh, I've seen the bigger picture already. I lived it. And you know what? It's fucking pointless without... Without all the small pictures too."
"I don't work on that level." His sword falls into his hand, giving Dave a silent count till three, before—
"Yes you do, dummy!"
Dank, clanking metal on all sides. An ominous thrum in the walls. Olive blood all over the ground.
Fear and grief flood his chest, piercing. The sword is gone.
"I'm so mad! I furgave you. I said you didn't need to apawlogize." Her eyes are brimming with tears now, and he can't stand it. Can't stand being the cause for it. "But I really thought you meant it. I thought you were going to at least try. And here you are, letting bullies walk all ofur you again."
"I'm not," he starts, but she's faster, bristling in her anger.
"You are. Only this time the bullies are inside you."
He's reeling.
"You're being rude, talking down to me like I don't unpurrstand the bigger picture." Blood drips down her chin as she talks. "You use that as a furront to cofur up the fact that you don't want to face your real felines. You'd rather be mean and rude and run away."
And then everything shrinks, dark, stuffy. He shoves forward, blindly, and the lid of the box he's in falls off, flowers scattering all over the floor.
They're in a church. He's sitting in the casket. Dave is standing at the lectern, looking like he's been crying for a week straight.
"I didn't run away," says Dirk, unsure how his voice is working. He's not sure how his head is back on. "I realized that we are trapped in a meaningless hell world, and decided to do something about it."
It's Dave who can't talk this time. He looks like if he tried, he might fall apart. So Dirk tries again.
"You know I left plans in motion. I wasn't going to just abandon you."
"I guess," Dave finally says, the stained glass arching up behind him, "I'm more hurt that. You didn't think of me. Didn't come to me for help."
"I just said. Meaningless hell world. You couldn't have helped."
"So what, then. You didn't think about how it would kill me inside? And if you did..." Dave stops again, swallows.
"Yes, I knew it would hurt you." Singled out from his other selves like this, in front of Dave's ashen face, it is almost too hard to say. "I counted on it, in fact. This world was going to break you anyway. So yes, I shifted a domino in that insane Rube Goldberg machine, so you'd hopefully break in a way that would be useful."
Dave makes an awful sound that's most of a scoff. "It fucking sucks that you can sit there saying this asshole bullshit with a straight face and I still can't hate you for it."
"You can and should," says Dirk. "Someone will take me down. Narratively speaking, I hope it will be you."
"How could you think I would? When all I wanted was another chance to let you know I love you?"
"I know you love me," says Dirk, fighting the pull of other selves who strain to know more. "That's not the point of this."
"And that's the part that kills me. That me loving you wasn't enough. You knowing that wasn't enough. I'm not enough."
"Listen," says Dirk, extremely uncomfortable. Dave isn't even rambling here, his words coming out in cut off chunks. "You're looking at it wrong. I am doing this precisely in order to make sure my family survives. You and Rose," are everything, he nearly says, and manages to make himself stop. What the fuck?
"That's always kinda been your problem," says Dave, moving away from the pulpit, stepping over a broken-off plank sticking out of the floor. "Basing all your grand plans on surviving, and not including yourself in the fuckin equation."
If Dirk's stomach wasn't sitting in a plastic bag in his abdominal cavity, it might be flipping. If his blood hadn't been replaced by formaldehyde, it might be rushing.
Dave keeps moving towards him, til he's got a knee over the edge of the casket. Some shitty swords clatter to the floor.
"I love being alive," says Dave, crawling in with him. "But I don't want to do this without you."
The stained glass bleeds and pulses orange and green before exploding into glittering grist, and the church dissolves into a velvet void.
There's a version of Dave in red knight pajamas floating out there in the glitter. For a beat, they're both alone in the void. Then, slowly, ghosts fade into view, all around Dave. Except on closer inspection, they aren't ghosts. They're his friends. Friends of his friends–an ever expanding circle of people he holds connections to, the massive cast of the story they shared. But Dirk is back in his cape, his bandages, his open toe boots, and he is alone. And he had planned this, he had done this all on purpose, and somehow the loneliness still splits him like a sword.
"What the fuck is happening," Dirk asks the void.
"Seems pretty obvious to me, dude," says Davepeta, glowing eye-searingly beside him. "You're getting your anime finale."
"None of this makes any sense. Where is this happening? Is this real?"
"Duh, it's anime. Nobody's watching for crisp plotting. They're here for the sick action, the loud emotions. It's all about the fuckin interiority. Shouldn't you know this?"
"I haven't watched a lot of anime," Dirk admits.
He gets the impression Davepeta is staring at him through their neon shades. "Why the fuck are you dressed like that, if you weren't shooting for anime?"
"Irony."
Davepeta giggles. "You're so boned."
"I know," Dirk says, still bleeding out on some level from overwhelming nonsense emotions, and also annoyed now. "I did set all this up explicitly to die. When the final battle—"
"No, man, the final battle is done. I mean, you're not going to die. You're going to get railed by frank sincerity, you're going to live, and you're going to hate it so much."
Dirk is formulating a response, when he notices that the giant crowd surrounding Dave over there in the void has grown. And right next to Dave, standing deepest in the circle of trust, is a splinter of himself.
Somehow that tears worse than anything so far. That he really is still there, in Dave's heart. Despite everything. And if he wanted to live, all he'd have to do is fall into that gravity and take it.
"Davepeta. You can sense the narrative, right? Is this really where the plot is supposed to go?"
"Uh, we got tackle-pounced out of the plot ages ago."
Something about this should have Dirk panicking, but it feels strangely muted. "Into an anime?"
"No, dude, does this look like a video to you? We're on AO3."
"Oh, the meta framework Calliope and I used to use."
"No, the actual AO3. We're not in a real anime. We're in an anime fix-it fic."
There's a vague spike of icy fear at that, but Dirk can't hold onto it. He catches the eye of the splinter, the other guy on the other side, and feels everything go far and faint and bleed back into white.
Dirk comes to, slowly. He's flat on his back, the sky silvery and deep like the dawn is about to break. Everything smells like blood.
"Hey," says Dave.
"Sup," says Dirk. It hurts to move, but he makes himself turn his head. Sure enough, Dave is lying there next to him.
It's then that Dirk realises where all the blood is coming from. His left arm is completely missing from the elbow down. Dave's right arm has suffered the same fate. Their blood has soaked into the sand, seeped into a mingled puddle between their bodies.
"You better make me a sick robot arm," says Dave.
"That's really all you have to say?"
"I mean, I'm assuming you also just lived through that psychedelic trauma slideshow. T-B-H, when we left off, it was your move."
Dirk closes his eyes, and feels washed out and transparent, like a cel held up to the sun.
"I admit it. I've lost," he says. "But to be completely honest with you, I expected to be dead at this point. I didn't exactly have a move queued up."
"Then how about we try my plan?"
Dirk hears Dave shifting in the sand, and hisses at the ungodly throb of pain as Dave jostles him. He cracks his eyes open to see Dave propped up over him, the stump of his arm still bleeding sluggishly. And then Dave is leaning in, looking determined, and Dirk shoves his working arm between them reflexively.
"What are you doing?"
"Thought it was obvious," says Dave, not moving back.
"It sounds like a great way to bleed out and die," says Dirk.
"Well," Dave says, "we can't die after all that. It wouldn't be very narratively satisfying now, would it?"
Dirk knows he lost the plot on what is apparently narratively satisfying a while back, but this rings conveniently true. He forces himself to look Dave in the eye, taking in the steady gaze looking back.
"I suppose I have always wanted to make out with someone in a pool of my own blood."
"This is the exact kind of diva shit we have to talk about later," says Dave, and Dirk eases the pressure in his arm, letting Dave sink down until their faces meet.
I love being alive, Dirk remembers, and kisses back.
There are still many threads to tidy up, but we will leave them there for now.
You see, AO3 reader, Dirk's "ironic" anime aesthetic had pulled him into a very specific gravity well, teeming with shadowy narrators: a rodeo in which he was not equipped to hold the reins. But I am.
If you gaze into the anime trash abyss, the anime trash abyss gazes also into you.
~*~ END ~*~
A/N:
Phew~! That took forever. (~_^)
NW: *Pulls curtain aside to reveal Ult Dirk in a cage with tape over his mouth*
Dirk: *rattling the bars on his cage in unbridled fury*
NW: Aw come on Dirky-chan. This won't be so bad. *throws orange soda into the cage* Please R/R! Flames feed my demonic soul. Arigato Ja ne! (^_^)
Dirk: o__O
