Fic: Generation Xerox
Your name is DAVE STRIDER, you are thirteen years old, and a BABY and a DEAD HORSE just crashed into your favorite record store on a METEOR. You are NOT READY FOR THIS.
Dave struggles with raising Bro, after the Scratch. This is my first fic and a monster at 4500ish words, so yeah.
The Scratch sounds like nails on chalkboard, only minus the nails and minus the chalkboard. So Egderp came through after all. Good. You’re in LOFAF when it happens, and you close your eyes and try not to think about reality being pulled apart. Fuck, you really hope you don’t screw up this time around.
Your name is DAVE STRIDER, you are thirteen years old, and a BABY and a DEAD HORSE just crashed into your favorite record store on a METEOR. You are NOT READY FOR THIS.
You might be flipping the fuck out. Just a little. The kid’s wearing a pair of tiny shades, and when you pick him up and slide the shades down his nose, you can see that his eyes are licorice red. Just like yours. He looks familiar, somehow, like you’ve seen his mom or something before, and you’re trying to figure out who he reminds you of until you think: fuck. He looks like you. He’s got your eyes and your nose and you can’t just leave him here. So you pick him up and put him in your (ironic) Barbie backpack, and you take him to the orphanage you call your home. There are a bunch of babies in the room next to you, anyway, and you can just tell people that you found the kid on the doormat or something.
When the kid’s safely sleeping in one of the spare cribs, you allow yourself a tiny moment of panic completely unbefitting a coolkid like you. Oh god, oh god, oh fuck, what the fuck is happening? Christ on a sideways unicycle, this just might be the weirdest fucking thing that’s ever happened to you. Normal weird is half a chicken nugget, and this weird is a… is a… Fuck. Fuck this. You can’t get your metaphors right. You’re thirteen and you just found a baby on a fucking meteor and you can’t even get your metaphors right. And with that weirdo who pestered yesterday-okay, you know what? Screw panic. You’re getting some fucking answers, goddamnit.
You take your Pesterphone, the new Skaianet Frostfrogs model that took you fifteen paper routes to buy, and-
--gardenGrandma [GG] began paging turntechGuardian [TG] at 4:13, December 1!--
GG: have you found him yet???
TG: okay maybe youre not completely fucking crazy after all
TG: just tell me who the hell the kid is anyway
GG: he’s your paradox clone who used to be your older brother before you reset the universe
GG: you’re supposed to raise him so he can save the world! :D
TG: and now were back to you being crazy again
GG: you are impossible!
GG: i guess you haven’t changed a bit at all! :D
GG: dont you remember him?
TG: no
But… you do. You know this kid. Hazy memories resurface like hillbillies fallen into the swampy bayou of your subconscious. You know that he likes puppets and hates broccoli and he’s going to be fucking killer with a sound system if he ever gets his hands on one. You can remember him in a baseball cap and shades straight out of the animes, teaching you how to work the turntables like a desperate rom-com stripper with a heart of gold, paying her way through medical school, works the pole. And that’s stupid, because he’s a baby and you’ve never seen him before in your life.
TG: okay okay cool your jets lady
TG: takeoff delayed for the time being
TG: please remain in your seats while we wait for air traffic to clear
TG: sorry for the inconvenience
TG: thank you for flying america air
TG: i wont call you crazy okay
TG: this days already crazy enough
TG: i guess i just gotta believe
TG: fuck this is stupid
TG: the shit just flew off the handle today
TG: it did an acrobatic fucking pirouette off the handle
GG: like it wants nothing to do with the handle! i get it dave!! jeez!!!
GG: you keep on reusing your memes ):
TG: whoa how
TG: never mind crazy psychic stuff im over it now
TG: but look
TG: i have no idea how to raise a kid
TG: at all
TG: and a thirteen year old parenting a baby alone might be a little bit oh i dont know
TG: illegal
TG: so i guess what im saying here is
TG: some help would be nice
GG: of course!!!
GG: i knew youd come around! :D
GG: see you tomorrow!
--gardenGrandma [GG] has stopped pestering turntechGuardian [TG]!--
TG: wait what
The next day, your social worker (“call-me-Ida”) tells you that you’ve just been adopted by Jade Harley, eccentric billionaire, CEO of Skaianet, so rich that she’s the one they invented the word billionaire for. When call-me-Ida invites you into her office, the door swings open to reveal a deeply tanned, wild-haired woman in her late fifties, who turns around in her chair to give you the derpiest fucking grin you’ve ever seen in the thirteen years you’ve been on the planet.
“Hi, Dave!” she says, and you can almost hear the exclamation mark. She has a strange accent-Hong Kong and Seattle and something harsh and melodic at once, and entirely never meant for the human tongue. She talks like she’s trying to bare fangs she doesn’t have.
“GG,” you drawl, every inch the Texas gentleman, “Sup.”
You spend the next hour in something that approximates a vegetative state, except that your eyes are open and you grunt once in a while so “call-me-Ida” thinks that you’re listening. You’re being adopted. You’re being adopted by a crazy as fuck billionaire grandma who talks like she’s more used to eating people’s faces off and uses a thousand exclamation marks at the end of every sentence and keeps around fifteen rifles on her “at all times!!!”. Cool.
Harley’s adopting the kid, and she’s letting you name him too. Broderick, you decide, partly out of spite, because you got literally two hours of sleep last night on account of the fact that you kept on sneaking into his room so you could make sure he hadn’t spontaneously combusted in his sleep or something, and, frankly, you feel just a little bit resentful.
“Bro for short,” you explain on the plane to Harley’s private island. You allow yourself to be just a little impressed that you’re going to live on a fucking private island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, how cool is that? Okay, more than a little bit, but you’ve got it covered. You’re not going to crack a facial expression even on the pain of fifteen-hour Squiddles marathon. Harley smiles her derpy grin at you.
The Harley house is Escherian in its paradoxical complexity. You learn this as she gives you the grand tour- you walk halfway up a flight of stairs only to find that you’re actually going downwards; the kitchen window, instead of leading out to the garden you see through it, opens into the basement; and when you walk down the hallway to your room, you end up, somehow, on the diving board of the pool outside. You get to the atrium via a storage room full of Squiddle dolls, but when you go back through the same door, you find yourself on the roof.
“Witch of Space training,” Harley explains. You pretend that you know what that means, but Harley takes your nonplussed expression as an invitation to explain everything-she was the Witch of Space, which has something to do with frogs and waking up early and volcano temples, she says, the hearty 1820s clipper ship of her nonchalance sailing across the treacherous Massachusetts waters of your conversation. She calls you the Knight of Time, the one who has to fix all the shit that doesn’t go down. She talks about grist and alien assholes who created your universe and a “good dog, best friend” who ended up dooming you all. It’s a bit much for you to take in, but-
But every word she says carries a sense of inevitability, like the whole shebang, Skaia and all, is as unavoidable as a car accident on a freeway full of drunk drivers. Only someone gone completely crazy could believe her story, but you guess you’ve never been the sanest guy in the room anyway.
And then she shows you a room full of expensive-looking sound equipment and beams at you like it’s her wedding and you just caught the bridal bouquet.
“I got a sound system for you, too!” she says.
“That’s nice, Harley,” you say back, “But I have no idea how to use this thing. It’s not like I had lessons back at the state home.”
“Oh. I guess… It’s just that my Dave, the other Dave, used to…” she says, trailing off at the end of the sentence, face fighting its natural urge to fall into an expression of general disappointment just long enough to make you feel like the biggest asshole in the world (nice going, Strider, you just made a sweet old lady sad) before she rallies herself.
“Well, I should show you the nursery,” she remarks with a grim sort of cheerfulness, and locks your elbow into a surprisingly strong grip and sweeps you away. She teaches you how to care for Bro, marching you through milk-bottle preparation and burping and even diaper-changing drills until you have domestic skill coming out of your ears.
“You’ll need to know it,” she says, “I’ll be gone most of tomorrow.” She smiles like she’s got about thirty billion razor-sharp dinosaur teeth and you’re the succulent prehistoric herbivore she’s been eyeing all day.
“After all,” she continues, “I have a grandson coming in by meteor.”
That night, you dream about Daves. You dream about Daves who give you thumbs-ups in wicked-looking suits, Daves who turn into orange feathery assholes and Daves drawing comics so shitty they’ll give a girl who types in teal text a case of the vapors, but mostly you dream about dead Daves. You have died enough times, you think, to build a fucking pyramid out of your own dead bodies, booby traps and all. You could get all Ancient Egypt up in LOHAC (you’ll wonder what LOHAC means when you wake up, but in the dream you remember), dead-Dave mummies and dead-Dave hieroglyph paint and even little decorative dead-Dave urns to place the ashes and pickled organs of other dead Daves in. In the dream, you do that, so desensitized to the squelch of your own brains on the floor and the sight of your own blood that you don’t even crack a grimace.
When you wake up, ears ringing with the howls of Bro’s discomfort, you understand jack shit. That’s okay. You think you’re getting used to it by now.
Bro needs his diaper changed. You change it and settle down beside him to make sure he doesn’t choke on air while he sleeps. If what Jade said is true, the whole damn world’s doomed if the kid kicks the bucket.
Your pesterphone trills sometime around seven.
--TanteTherapist [TT] began pestering turntechGuardian [TG] !-
TT: Hello, Dave.
TT: I don’t believe we’ve been introduced. I’m Rose Lalonde, third member of the Beneficiaries of the Skaian Meteor Adoption Service Club and erstwhile Seer of Light. I believe that the civil thing to do in this situation is to say that it’s nice to meet (or, rather, type at) you.
TG: sup
TG: im really getting tired of people knowing my name before i tell them
TG: its like you flighty broads get off on pretending to be enigmatic and omniscient and shit
TT: I do admit that I can be abstruse at times, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say enigmatic.
TT: Jade and I are quite happy to answer any questions you pose.
TG: yeah well that aint any help when i cant understand anything she says
TG: I don’t remember shit about sburb
TG: and every time i do remember i understand fuck all about it
TG: like im supposed to be this genius dj or whatever
TG: how messed up is that
TG: what do djs even do anyway
TT: I must admit that when Jade first contacted me, I was in the same predicament.
TT: However, I have managed to fill in the considerable blanks since then.
TT: For example, I seem to have an aptitude for knitting I don’t remember acquiring.
TT: I suspect the situation must be the same with you.
TT: Remember, what the mind forgets, the body remembers. Or, in this case, the subconscious.
TG: why miss lalonde are you trying to seduce me
TT: Hmm.
TT: Tell me, Dave, have you ever heard of an Oedipal complex?
TG: wait what
You proceed to have the most awkward conversation in the history of unwanted psychoanalysis. Once you get Rose to stop convincing you that everything in your dreams symbolizes dicks, you spend the rest of the day lost in the Harley House, Bro in one of the Squiddle baby slings (“It’s ironic,” you tell him) Harley got for you and trying not to remember Lalondian superior conversational prowess. But then you pass the room with the turntables and DJ shit Harley set up and think: what the mind forgets, the body remembers. Fuck.
You open up Freshjamz on the laptop Harley set up and pick a file at random and-
And you remember this song, remember that you’ve been working on it for months and only recently figured out what to do with it. You mix one of Jade’s awesome bass lines in, keep it the constant that the entire melody revolves around, slip in the familiar plinks of John’s piano and weave the dramatic wails of Rose’s violin into the beats you made when you were six and Bro’d just started teaching you music. You tweak every note until it’s perfect, and, yes, you’re doing this, you’re making it happen, you’re Dave fucking Strider and you’re making the best goddamn music in the entire fucking world. But then a voice at the back of your mind says: you shouldn’t know how to be, and the wave of elation you’ve been surfing turns out to be a tsunami of wrong. In that moment, rocking beats so sick they have terminal cancer, you were taken over by a Dave whose life you never lived. Fuck. What the fuck is happening to you?
In the nest of blankets and sofa cushions you constructed for him, Bro starts crying, because, fuck, he's a baby and he might as well. You try not to cry with him.
Years later, this is what you’ll remember the most about your time at the Harley House:
Bro’s a little over five months old when Harley arranges a meet-up for the Meteor Babies club, to celebrate the addition of its fourth and last member. Lalonde looks like the photo of your dead mother you won’t admit to keeping, which freaks you out just a little, and talks with an ironic eloquence that you can’t help but imagine in lavender text. Harley introduces you to Egbert as well, her paradox alien twin or whatever, the reason there isn’t any cake at this whole shebang and the only person whose level of age-inappropriate optimism can give Harley’s derpiness a run for its money. He looks like the kindly old grandfathers you see in the movies, white hair and folksy accent and all.
You’re fourteen and Harley’s back from one of the adventures she’s always off on. Mombasa this time, you think, or at least somewhere in Kenya anyway. She’s got Jay slung over her shoulder (she brings her grandson with her everywhere, to “foster his sense of adventure!! :D”, even though he’s a baby and doesn’t have a sense of adventure to even foster) and a sewage treatment facility’s worth of shit that she’ll probably dump in a room somewhere and forget forever. Among the useless shit is a giant fucking robot she apparently expects you to fight with nothing but a shitty broken sword. It’s impossible to argue with Harley, as you’ll later learn. She has a way of just assuming that everything will fall into place and not letting reality displace her assumptions. Every time you try to tell her that there’s no way she’ll get you within ten feet of that death machine, she shoots you a glare that reminds you that she’s fifty-eight and doing things ten times more dangerous than just fighting a robot, so you’re a fucking pussy for even trying to chicken out.
Bro’s exactly one year and five days old when he says his first word. You’re trying to teach him how to say “Dave” when it happens.
“Daaaaaaaaaaaave,” you say, patiently.
“Daff,” says Bro.
“Daaaaaaaaaaaave,” you repeat.
“Doof,” says Bro.
“No, not doof-“
“Dad,” says Bro. You freeze. Then you whip out your pesterphone and start typing at breakneck speed.
-- turntechGuardian [TG] began pestering tanteTherapist [TT]!-
TG: hey lalonde guess what
TG: my meteor babys smarter than yours
TG: bro just said his first word
TG: im pretty sure lil lalonde is still googoogagaing all over the fucking place
-- turntechGuardian [TG] began pestering grandpaTrickster [GT]!-
TG: hey Egbert guess what
TG: bro just called me dad
TG: how fucking cool is that huh
TG: in your bucktoothed face
-- turntechGuardian [TG] began pestering gardenGrandma [GG]!-
TG: harley sup
TG: guess whose meteor kid said his first word
TG: im pretty sure this means bros smarter than all your kids
TG: no hard feelings right
GG: gee, dave thats great!!!
GG: but I’ve had jay speaking Cantonese for weeks so technically bro’s not the first!
GG: hehe!!! :D
TG: fuck you harley chinese dont count
This is when you realize that you’re acting patently uncool, but the damage is already done. Your street cred will never recover.
You’re fifteen and attacking one of Harley’s giant fucking robots. You dodge a laser (seriously, Harley, lasers? Is she trying to kill you or what?) and take out your shitty sword from your strife specibu-oh fuck, where’d that fist come from? You close your eyes and wait to be pummeled, but then… You feel something give in the fabric of the universe, and you wrap time itself around your shoulders in a way that’s reminiscent of the way an old lady wraps her technicolor fugly hand-crocheted shawl around hers, and the robot slows like it’s trying to move through a bathtub full of jello. You jump over the fist easily, run up the robot’s arm, and cut the robot’s head off, shitty broken sword cleaving through circuitry and metal. You exhale, noisily, and that’s when time starts up again. Risking a glance at Harley’s spectator-slash-creeper balcony, you can see that the old lady’s got this beatific fucking smile on, like she’s watching a prima ballerina execute a particularly complicated set of dance moves instead of you executing a robot that must have taken her at least half an hour to make.
“What the fuck did I just do, Harley?” you ask. Harley teleports her way into the arena with a well-practiced flicker of green energy, the showoff, and places a wrinkled hand on your shoulder.
“You remembered.”
You’re sixteen and studying for your GED when you finally figure out what you want to do with your life. Bro’s running around on the playground Jade set up for him and her grandson. Harley’s got too much money and not enough sense sometimes-who the hell builds a playground only two kids are ever gonna use, anyway? You’re keeping an eye on Bro. It would be just like Harley to rig the slide or jungle gym to try and kill him so she can trigger his hidden superpowers or something, so you have to be careful.
TG: see jade is like a kung fu master or something
TG: all look within yourself to find your secret power
TG: and if that doesnt work ill try to kill you and see what happens
TG: yeah it worked with me but bro might be different or something
TG: im not letting him get killed because harleys trying to make us all the human equivalents of nukes
GT: she’s not that bad!
GT: she is just a mysterious dame.
GT: you cannot hope to beat her in a mystery-off. she is simply the most mysterious there is!
GT: anyway, dave, you’re avoiding the subject!
GT: don’t think i can’t see through all your tricks! i’m the master trickster, remember?
GT: have you figured out what you want to do when you grow up yet?
GT: if you have a passion for japery, we’re always hiring at the John Egbert Joke Emporium!
TG: i dont know
TG: i guess im pretty good at music
But then you remember irregular paychecks and shitty swords in the fridge and never having a working heater in winter. You remember justice, spelled with a 1 and a 3, and the strange, familiar urge a you whose life you never lived had to protect.
TG: you know what
TG: fuck music imma be a cop
You’re seventeen and you and Jade are watching Jay and Bro play with some of her billions of Squiddle dolls. They’re back from Hong Kong, and Jade’s regaling you with a tall tale about the time when she was twenty and won an illegal Strife competition by convincing grizzled veteran street fighters to teach her their awesome moves. She’s got some new sick bass beats for you, and you already have plans to use them in a new song-one that you’ll make without relying on SBURB-Dave’s expertise. She tells you that she won another street Strife competition this time, and used her championship and considerable riches as leverage to get the best Strifers on the Hong Kong circuit to promise to train Jay when he’s older. She probably used her Witch of Space superpowers to cheat. When you tell her this, she admits it, but quickly adds that those young whippersnappers had no business trying to beat up a sweet, fragile old lady like her, anyway.
It is at this point, laughing so hard that your cool façade almost slips, that you realize that you are happy.
You move out the Harley house when you’re eighteen.
“If you stayed longer, the game would think you’re cheating,” Jade explains, “And it’d probably try to kill you.”
So you and Bro leave, to Texas. Dallas, to be exact. After all, there’s no place like home. A week later, you get a call from Jay saying that Jade’s dead. A week after that, you get a letter in the mail with a photo of a huge ship against the background of a billion stars and a blue, cloudy planet with a yellow moon. This is what the letter says: i’m not dead!!! :D . You decide to believe it.
You get your AS in Law Enforcement, and you’re a cop by the time you’re twenty. You’re one of the best damn recruits in the force, too. You’re good with your truncheon (which is pretty much the same as a blunt sword anyway) and you always get your paperwork done on time. Sometimes you even catch a criminal or twenty-five. Jane in Forensics tells you the other cops call you Ice, because of your ever-present composure and the fact that you always keep your jacket on, even when it’s a hundred degrees outside. You tell her that the nickname’s probably ironic. She tells you that you probably got your definition of irony from an Alannis Morisette song.
The most important thing you’re doing is training Bro. You teach him about music when he's six and swords when he's seven and buy him all the puppets he could ever ask for, even though the puppets freak you out. You keep to a schedule of regular intervals: surprise strife every four hours, booby trap every five and fifteen seconds, dinner at seven fourteen and two seconds and if he's a second late then he doesn't get any. You train him to keep the tick of the metronome a constant at the back of his head, how be so painfully aware of time he gets all twitchy when he sees a clock that's just a little bit off. When he comes home upset because the kids at the playground were laughing at him or something like that, you teach him how to act like he doesn’t care, how to pretend that he knows something that makes the newest sneakers or designer phones or having a mother the dumbest thing ever, duh. He’s even better at it than you are.
“More puppets?” you ask him, once, before you’ve given up all your hope that the puppet thing is just a phase.
“They’re ironic, Dad,” he explains, slowly, like he’s a nuclear physicist and you’re an especially slow kindergartener asking him what he does all day. He’s nine years old, and even though you’re twenty-two, he can already manage to make you feel incredibly uncool. You don’t ask him about the puppets again, even when you wake up with one of them right in front of your face oh fuck and have nightmares for the rest of the week.
You’re relieved when Bro starts talking to the other meteor babies. It means that the game’s moving forward and also that he’ll start asking them to help him with his homework, not you. When the hell did they start making fourth grade so hard anyway? He starts spending more and more of his time holed up with the computer, typing furiously on Pesterchum or whatever they call it these days. That’s fine with you. The two of you don’t exactly live in a good neighborhood-there are crack dealers and muggers everywhere, and even though learning how to fight and avoid them is good practice for him, you can’t help but worry and follow him from a distance when he walks to school.
He’s a good kid. You just hope that that’ll be enough.
You’re twenty-six when the meteors come, and fuck if you don’t know how to do this. Bro’s strifing with you on the roof, and you dodge every one of his hits with ease and dazzling speed. Fuck. You should’ve trained him better. You should’ve spent more time teaching him how to fight, should’ve been harsher, more aloof, maybe. You should’ve made sure he’ll survive the game. You should have done a lot of things.
Bro throws a puppet at you, and you duck under it like you’re somebody’s drunk uncle doing the limbo on Christmas Eve. You hit him with the flat side of your sword. If you didn’t have Time powers, he’d win this strife, you think, and… And this might be the last time you see him. So you the next time he lunges at you, you’re just a second slower than you usually are, and his non-shitty (or at least better than yours) sword just barely nicks your arm. You disarm him, and hug him, even though the last time you hugged him was years and years ago.
“You did good, kid,” you say, and ruffle his hair, and wish you could say goodbye instead.
When you cut the meteor headed towards Bro clear in half, you pull out your pesterphone and send a message to Jade.
--turntechGuardian [TG] started pestering gardenGrandma [GG]!---
TG: hey jade
TG: i mean harley
TG: you can steer your ship to wherever bros going right
TG: heres the thing
TG: i need a ride
You’ll follow him into the Medium, you promise yourself, and you’ll make sure he lives. You’re Dave fucking Strider, after all, and you’ve always been good at protecting your son.
Dave struggles with raising Bro, after the Scratch. This is my first fic and a monster at 4500ish words, so yeah.
The Scratch sounds like nails on chalkboard, only minus the nails and minus the chalkboard. So Egderp came through after all. Good. You’re in LOFAF when it happens, and you close your eyes and try not to think about reality being pulled apart. Fuck, you really hope you don’t screw up this time around.
Your name is DAVE STRIDER, you are thirteen years old, and a BABY and a DEAD HORSE just crashed into your favorite record store on a METEOR. You are NOT READY FOR THIS.
You might be flipping the fuck out. Just a little. The kid’s wearing a pair of tiny shades, and when you pick him up and slide the shades down his nose, you can see that his eyes are licorice red. Just like yours. He looks familiar, somehow, like you’ve seen his mom or something before, and you’re trying to figure out who he reminds you of until you think: fuck. He looks like you. He’s got your eyes and your nose and you can’t just leave him here. So you pick him up and put him in your (ironic) Barbie backpack, and you take him to the orphanage you call your home. There are a bunch of babies in the room next to you, anyway, and you can just tell people that you found the kid on the doormat or something.
When the kid’s safely sleeping in one of the spare cribs, you allow yourself a tiny moment of panic completely unbefitting a coolkid like you. Oh god, oh god, oh fuck, what the fuck is happening? Christ on a sideways unicycle, this just might be the weirdest fucking thing that’s ever happened to you. Normal weird is half a chicken nugget, and this weird is a… is a… Fuck. Fuck this. You can’t get your metaphors right. You’re thirteen and you just found a baby on a fucking meteor and you can’t even get your metaphors right. And with that weirdo who pestered yesterday-okay, you know what? Screw panic. You’re getting some fucking answers, goddamnit.
You take your Pesterphone, the new Skaianet Frostfrogs model that took you fifteen paper routes to buy, and-
--gardenGrandma [GG] began paging turntechGuardian [TG] at 4:13, December 1!--
GG: have you found him yet???
TG: okay maybe youre not completely fucking crazy after all
TG: just tell me who the hell the kid is anyway
GG: he’s your paradox clone who used to be your older brother before you reset the universe
GG: you’re supposed to raise him so he can save the world! :D
TG: and now were back to you being crazy again
GG: you are impossible!
GG: i guess you haven’t changed a bit at all! :D
GG: dont you remember him?
TG: no
But… you do. You know this kid. Hazy memories resurface like hillbillies fallen into the swampy bayou of your subconscious. You know that he likes puppets and hates broccoli and he’s going to be fucking killer with a sound system if he ever gets his hands on one. You can remember him in a baseball cap and shades straight out of the animes, teaching you how to work the turntables like a desperate rom-com stripper with a heart of gold, paying her way through medical school, works the pole. And that’s stupid, because he’s a baby and you’ve never seen him before in your life.
TG: okay okay cool your jets lady
TG: takeoff delayed for the time being
TG: please remain in your seats while we wait for air traffic to clear
TG: sorry for the inconvenience
TG: thank you for flying america air
TG: i wont call you crazy okay
TG: this days already crazy enough
TG: i guess i just gotta believe
TG: fuck this is stupid
TG: the shit just flew off the handle today
TG: it did an acrobatic fucking pirouette off the handle
GG: like it wants nothing to do with the handle! i get it dave!! jeez!!!
GG: you keep on reusing your memes ):
TG: whoa how
TG: never mind crazy psychic stuff im over it now
TG: but look
TG: i have no idea how to raise a kid
TG: at all
TG: and a thirteen year old parenting a baby alone might be a little bit oh i dont know
TG: illegal
TG: so i guess what im saying here is
TG: some help would be nice
GG: of course!!!
GG: i knew youd come around! :D
GG: see you tomorrow!
--gardenGrandma [GG] has stopped pestering turntechGuardian [TG]!--
TG: wait what
The next day, your social worker (“call-me-Ida”) tells you that you’ve just been adopted by Jade Harley, eccentric billionaire, CEO of Skaianet, so rich that she’s the one they invented the word billionaire for. When call-me-Ida invites you into her office, the door swings open to reveal a deeply tanned, wild-haired woman in her late fifties, who turns around in her chair to give you the derpiest fucking grin you’ve ever seen in the thirteen years you’ve been on the planet.
“Hi, Dave!” she says, and you can almost hear the exclamation mark. She has a strange accent-Hong Kong and Seattle and something harsh and melodic at once, and entirely never meant for the human tongue. She talks like she’s trying to bare fangs she doesn’t have.
“GG,” you drawl, every inch the Texas gentleman, “Sup.”
You spend the next hour in something that approximates a vegetative state, except that your eyes are open and you grunt once in a while so “call-me-Ida” thinks that you’re listening. You’re being adopted. You’re being adopted by a crazy as fuck billionaire grandma who talks like she’s more used to eating people’s faces off and uses a thousand exclamation marks at the end of every sentence and keeps around fifteen rifles on her “at all times!!!”. Cool.
Harley’s adopting the kid, and she’s letting you name him too. Broderick, you decide, partly out of spite, because you got literally two hours of sleep last night on account of the fact that you kept on sneaking into his room so you could make sure he hadn’t spontaneously combusted in his sleep or something, and, frankly, you feel just a little bit resentful.
“Bro for short,” you explain on the plane to Harley’s private island. You allow yourself to be just a little impressed that you’re going to live on a fucking private island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, how cool is that? Okay, more than a little bit, but you’ve got it covered. You’re not going to crack a facial expression even on the pain of fifteen-hour Squiddles marathon. Harley smiles her derpy grin at you.
The Harley house is Escherian in its paradoxical complexity. You learn this as she gives you the grand tour- you walk halfway up a flight of stairs only to find that you’re actually going downwards; the kitchen window, instead of leading out to the garden you see through it, opens into the basement; and when you walk down the hallway to your room, you end up, somehow, on the diving board of the pool outside. You get to the atrium via a storage room full of Squiddle dolls, but when you go back through the same door, you find yourself on the roof.
“Witch of Space training,” Harley explains. You pretend that you know what that means, but Harley takes your nonplussed expression as an invitation to explain everything-she was the Witch of Space, which has something to do with frogs and waking up early and volcano temples, she says, the hearty 1820s clipper ship of her nonchalance sailing across the treacherous Massachusetts waters of your conversation. She calls you the Knight of Time, the one who has to fix all the shit that doesn’t go down. She talks about grist and alien assholes who created your universe and a “good dog, best friend” who ended up dooming you all. It’s a bit much for you to take in, but-
But every word she says carries a sense of inevitability, like the whole shebang, Skaia and all, is as unavoidable as a car accident on a freeway full of drunk drivers. Only someone gone completely crazy could believe her story, but you guess you’ve never been the sanest guy in the room anyway.
And then she shows you a room full of expensive-looking sound equipment and beams at you like it’s her wedding and you just caught the bridal bouquet.
“I got a sound system for you, too!” she says.
“That’s nice, Harley,” you say back, “But I have no idea how to use this thing. It’s not like I had lessons back at the state home.”
“Oh. I guess… It’s just that my Dave, the other Dave, used to…” she says, trailing off at the end of the sentence, face fighting its natural urge to fall into an expression of general disappointment just long enough to make you feel like the biggest asshole in the world (nice going, Strider, you just made a sweet old lady sad) before she rallies herself.
“Well, I should show you the nursery,” she remarks with a grim sort of cheerfulness, and locks your elbow into a surprisingly strong grip and sweeps you away. She teaches you how to care for Bro, marching you through milk-bottle preparation and burping and even diaper-changing drills until you have domestic skill coming out of your ears.
“You’ll need to know it,” she says, “I’ll be gone most of tomorrow.” She smiles like she’s got about thirty billion razor-sharp dinosaur teeth and you’re the succulent prehistoric herbivore she’s been eyeing all day.
“After all,” she continues, “I have a grandson coming in by meteor.”
That night, you dream about Daves. You dream about Daves who give you thumbs-ups in wicked-looking suits, Daves who turn into orange feathery assholes and Daves drawing comics so shitty they’ll give a girl who types in teal text a case of the vapors, but mostly you dream about dead Daves. You have died enough times, you think, to build a fucking pyramid out of your own dead bodies, booby traps and all. You could get all Ancient Egypt up in LOHAC (you’ll wonder what LOHAC means when you wake up, but in the dream you remember), dead-Dave mummies and dead-Dave hieroglyph paint and even little decorative dead-Dave urns to place the ashes and pickled organs of other dead Daves in. In the dream, you do that, so desensitized to the squelch of your own brains on the floor and the sight of your own blood that you don’t even crack a grimace.
When you wake up, ears ringing with the howls of Bro’s discomfort, you understand jack shit. That’s okay. You think you’re getting used to it by now.
Bro needs his diaper changed. You change it and settle down beside him to make sure he doesn’t choke on air while he sleeps. If what Jade said is true, the whole damn world’s doomed if the kid kicks the bucket.
Your pesterphone trills sometime around seven.
--TanteTherapist [TT] began pestering turntechGuardian [TG] !-
TT: Hello, Dave.
TT: I don’t believe we’ve been introduced. I’m Rose Lalonde, third member of the Beneficiaries of the Skaian Meteor Adoption Service Club and erstwhile Seer of Light. I believe that the civil thing to do in this situation is to say that it’s nice to meet (or, rather, type at) you.
TG: sup
TG: im really getting tired of people knowing my name before i tell them
TG: its like you flighty broads get off on pretending to be enigmatic and omniscient and shit
TT: I do admit that I can be abstruse at times, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say enigmatic.
TT: Jade and I are quite happy to answer any questions you pose.
TG: yeah well that aint any help when i cant understand anything she says
TG: I don’t remember shit about sburb
TG: and every time i do remember i understand fuck all about it
TG: like im supposed to be this genius dj or whatever
TG: how messed up is that
TG: what do djs even do anyway
TT: I must admit that when Jade first contacted me, I was in the same predicament.
TT: However, I have managed to fill in the considerable blanks since then.
TT: For example, I seem to have an aptitude for knitting I don’t remember acquiring.
TT: I suspect the situation must be the same with you.
TT: Remember, what the mind forgets, the body remembers. Or, in this case, the subconscious.
TG: why miss lalonde are you trying to seduce me
TT: Hmm.
TT: Tell me, Dave, have you ever heard of an Oedipal complex?
TG: wait what
You proceed to have the most awkward conversation in the history of unwanted psychoanalysis. Once you get Rose to stop convincing you that everything in your dreams symbolizes dicks, you spend the rest of the day lost in the Harley House, Bro in one of the Squiddle baby slings (“It’s ironic,” you tell him) Harley got for you and trying not to remember Lalondian superior conversational prowess. But then you pass the room with the turntables and DJ shit Harley set up and think: what the mind forgets, the body remembers. Fuck.
You open up Freshjamz on the laptop Harley set up and pick a file at random and-
And you remember this song, remember that you’ve been working on it for months and only recently figured out what to do with it. You mix one of Jade’s awesome bass lines in, keep it the constant that the entire melody revolves around, slip in the familiar plinks of John’s piano and weave the dramatic wails of Rose’s violin into the beats you made when you were six and Bro’d just started teaching you music. You tweak every note until it’s perfect, and, yes, you’re doing this, you’re making it happen, you’re Dave fucking Strider and you’re making the best goddamn music in the entire fucking world. But then a voice at the back of your mind says: you shouldn’t know how to be, and the wave of elation you’ve been surfing turns out to be a tsunami of wrong. In that moment, rocking beats so sick they have terminal cancer, you were taken over by a Dave whose life you never lived. Fuck. What the fuck is happening to you?
In the nest of blankets and sofa cushions you constructed for him, Bro starts crying, because, fuck, he's a baby and he might as well. You try not to cry with him.
Years later, this is what you’ll remember the most about your time at the Harley House:
Bro’s a little over five months old when Harley arranges a meet-up for the Meteor Babies club, to celebrate the addition of its fourth and last member. Lalonde looks like the photo of your dead mother you won’t admit to keeping, which freaks you out just a little, and talks with an ironic eloquence that you can’t help but imagine in lavender text. Harley introduces you to Egbert as well, her paradox alien twin or whatever, the reason there isn’t any cake at this whole shebang and the only person whose level of age-inappropriate optimism can give Harley’s derpiness a run for its money. He looks like the kindly old grandfathers you see in the movies, white hair and folksy accent and all.
You’re fourteen and Harley’s back from one of the adventures she’s always off on. Mombasa this time, you think, or at least somewhere in Kenya anyway. She’s got Jay slung over her shoulder (she brings her grandson with her everywhere, to “foster his sense of adventure!! :D”, even though he’s a baby and doesn’t have a sense of adventure to even foster) and a sewage treatment facility’s worth of shit that she’ll probably dump in a room somewhere and forget forever. Among the useless shit is a giant fucking robot she apparently expects you to fight with nothing but a shitty broken sword. It’s impossible to argue with Harley, as you’ll later learn. She has a way of just assuming that everything will fall into place and not letting reality displace her assumptions. Every time you try to tell her that there’s no way she’ll get you within ten feet of that death machine, she shoots you a glare that reminds you that she’s fifty-eight and doing things ten times more dangerous than just fighting a robot, so you’re a fucking pussy for even trying to chicken out.
Bro’s exactly one year and five days old when he says his first word. You’re trying to teach him how to say “Dave” when it happens.
“Daaaaaaaaaaaave,” you say, patiently.
“Daff,” says Bro.
“Daaaaaaaaaaaave,” you repeat.
“Doof,” says Bro.
“No, not doof-“
“Dad,” says Bro. You freeze. Then you whip out your pesterphone and start typing at breakneck speed.
-- turntechGuardian [TG] began pestering tanteTherapist [TT]!-
TG: hey lalonde guess what
TG: my meteor babys smarter than yours
TG: bro just said his first word
TG: im pretty sure lil lalonde is still googoogagaing all over the fucking place
-- turntechGuardian [TG] began pestering grandpaTrickster [GT]!-
TG: hey Egbert guess what
TG: bro just called me dad
TG: how fucking cool is that huh
TG: in your bucktoothed face
-- turntechGuardian [TG] began pestering gardenGrandma [GG]!-
TG: harley sup
TG: guess whose meteor kid said his first word
TG: im pretty sure this means bros smarter than all your kids
TG: no hard feelings right
GG: gee, dave thats great!!!
GG: but I’ve had jay speaking Cantonese for weeks so technically bro’s not the first!
GG: hehe!!! :D
TG: fuck you harley chinese dont count
This is when you realize that you’re acting patently uncool, but the damage is already done. Your street cred will never recover.
You’re fifteen and attacking one of Harley’s giant fucking robots. You dodge a laser (seriously, Harley, lasers? Is she trying to kill you or what?) and take out your shitty sword from your strife specibu-oh fuck, where’d that fist come from? You close your eyes and wait to be pummeled, but then… You feel something give in the fabric of the universe, and you wrap time itself around your shoulders in a way that’s reminiscent of the way an old lady wraps her technicolor fugly hand-crocheted shawl around hers, and the robot slows like it’s trying to move through a bathtub full of jello. You jump over the fist easily, run up the robot’s arm, and cut the robot’s head off, shitty broken sword cleaving through circuitry and metal. You exhale, noisily, and that’s when time starts up again. Risking a glance at Harley’s spectator-slash-creeper balcony, you can see that the old lady’s got this beatific fucking smile on, like she’s watching a prima ballerina execute a particularly complicated set of dance moves instead of you executing a robot that must have taken her at least half an hour to make.
“What the fuck did I just do, Harley?” you ask. Harley teleports her way into the arena with a well-practiced flicker of green energy, the showoff, and places a wrinkled hand on your shoulder.
“You remembered.”
You’re sixteen and studying for your GED when you finally figure out what you want to do with your life. Bro’s running around on the playground Jade set up for him and her grandson. Harley’s got too much money and not enough sense sometimes-who the hell builds a playground only two kids are ever gonna use, anyway? You’re keeping an eye on Bro. It would be just like Harley to rig the slide or jungle gym to try and kill him so she can trigger his hidden superpowers or something, so you have to be careful.
TG: see jade is like a kung fu master or something
TG: all look within yourself to find your secret power
TG: and if that doesnt work ill try to kill you and see what happens
TG: yeah it worked with me but bro might be different or something
TG: im not letting him get killed because harleys trying to make us all the human equivalents of nukes
GT: she’s not that bad!
GT: she is just a mysterious dame.
GT: you cannot hope to beat her in a mystery-off. she is simply the most mysterious there is!
GT: anyway, dave, you’re avoiding the subject!
GT: don’t think i can’t see through all your tricks! i’m the master trickster, remember?
GT: have you figured out what you want to do when you grow up yet?
GT: if you have a passion for japery, we’re always hiring at the John Egbert Joke Emporium!
TG: i dont know
TG: i guess im pretty good at music
But then you remember irregular paychecks and shitty swords in the fridge and never having a working heater in winter. You remember justice, spelled with a 1 and a 3, and the strange, familiar urge a you whose life you never lived had to protect.
TG: you know what
TG: fuck music imma be a cop
You’re seventeen and you and Jade are watching Jay and Bro play with some of her billions of Squiddle dolls. They’re back from Hong Kong, and Jade’s regaling you with a tall tale about the time when she was twenty and won an illegal Strife competition by convincing grizzled veteran street fighters to teach her their awesome moves. She’s got some new sick bass beats for you, and you already have plans to use them in a new song-one that you’ll make without relying on SBURB-Dave’s expertise. She tells you that she won another street Strife competition this time, and used her championship and considerable riches as leverage to get the best Strifers on the Hong Kong circuit to promise to train Jay when he’s older. She probably used her Witch of Space superpowers to cheat. When you tell her this, she admits it, but quickly adds that those young whippersnappers had no business trying to beat up a sweet, fragile old lady like her, anyway.
It is at this point, laughing so hard that your cool façade almost slips, that you realize that you are happy.
You move out the Harley house when you’re eighteen.
“If you stayed longer, the game would think you’re cheating,” Jade explains, “And it’d probably try to kill you.”
So you and Bro leave, to Texas. Dallas, to be exact. After all, there’s no place like home. A week later, you get a call from Jay saying that Jade’s dead. A week after that, you get a letter in the mail with a photo of a huge ship against the background of a billion stars and a blue, cloudy planet with a yellow moon. This is what the letter says: i’m not dead!!! :D . You decide to believe it.
You get your AS in Law Enforcement, and you’re a cop by the time you’re twenty. You’re one of the best damn recruits in the force, too. You’re good with your truncheon (which is pretty much the same as a blunt sword anyway) and you always get your paperwork done on time. Sometimes you even catch a criminal or twenty-five. Jane in Forensics tells you the other cops call you Ice, because of your ever-present composure and the fact that you always keep your jacket on, even when it’s a hundred degrees outside. You tell her that the nickname’s probably ironic. She tells you that you probably got your definition of irony from an Alannis Morisette song.
The most important thing you’re doing is training Bro. You teach him about music when he's six and swords when he's seven and buy him all the puppets he could ever ask for, even though the puppets freak you out. You keep to a schedule of regular intervals: surprise strife every four hours, booby trap every five and fifteen seconds, dinner at seven fourteen and two seconds and if he's a second late then he doesn't get any. You train him to keep the tick of the metronome a constant at the back of his head, how be so painfully aware of time he gets all twitchy when he sees a clock that's just a little bit off. When he comes home upset because the kids at the playground were laughing at him or something like that, you teach him how to act like he doesn’t care, how to pretend that he knows something that makes the newest sneakers or designer phones or having a mother the dumbest thing ever, duh. He’s even better at it than you are.
“More puppets?” you ask him, once, before you’ve given up all your hope that the puppet thing is just a phase.
“They’re ironic, Dad,” he explains, slowly, like he’s a nuclear physicist and you’re an especially slow kindergartener asking him what he does all day. He’s nine years old, and even though you’re twenty-two, he can already manage to make you feel incredibly uncool. You don’t ask him about the puppets again, even when you wake up with one of them right in front of your face oh fuck and have nightmares for the rest of the week.
You’re relieved when Bro starts talking to the other meteor babies. It means that the game’s moving forward and also that he’ll start asking them to help him with his homework, not you. When the hell did they start making fourth grade so hard anyway? He starts spending more and more of his time holed up with the computer, typing furiously on Pesterchum or whatever they call it these days. That’s fine with you. The two of you don’t exactly live in a good neighborhood-there are crack dealers and muggers everywhere, and even though learning how to fight and avoid them is good practice for him, you can’t help but worry and follow him from a distance when he walks to school.
He’s a good kid. You just hope that that’ll be enough.
You’re twenty-six when the meteors come, and fuck if you don’t know how to do this. Bro’s strifing with you on the roof, and you dodge every one of his hits with ease and dazzling speed. Fuck. You should’ve trained him better. You should’ve spent more time teaching him how to fight, should’ve been harsher, more aloof, maybe. You should’ve made sure he’ll survive the game. You should have done a lot of things.
Bro throws a puppet at you, and you duck under it like you’re somebody’s drunk uncle doing the limbo on Christmas Eve. You hit him with the flat side of your sword. If you didn’t have Time powers, he’d win this strife, you think, and… And this might be the last time you see him. So you the next time he lunges at you, you’re just a second slower than you usually are, and his non-shitty (or at least better than yours) sword just barely nicks your arm. You disarm him, and hug him, even though the last time you hugged him was years and years ago.
“You did good, kid,” you say, and ruffle his hair, and wish you could say goodbye instead.
When you cut the meteor headed towards Bro clear in half, you pull out your pesterphone and send a message to Jade.
--turntechGuardian [TG] started pestering gardenGrandma [GG]!---
TG: hey jade
TG: i mean harley
TG: you can steer your ship to wherever bros going right
TG: heres the thing
TG: i need a ride
You’ll follow him into the Medium, you promise yourself, and you’ll make sure he lives. You’re Dave fucking Strider, after all, and you’ve always been good at protecting your son.