Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It's hard to keep fighting a war that you know you're going to lose. Rose's rebellion is fueled more by anger than by hope; she fights not to save humanity, but to wreak preemptive vengeance for the destruction of her world and the extinction of her species. Rose doesn't really think much of humanity, on the whole, but it's still hers. Fury is what drives her, fury and a fierce, defiant, desperate love that she terms 'solidarity.' Having seen what the future holds, she categorically refuses to let her best friend face it alone.

It's easier, sometimes, to live for Dave than to live for a daughter she will never meet. He is hers in a much more immediate way, and when despair threatens to swallow her, he's the only thing in the doomed world that can still make her smile. She could never have carried out this decades-long suicide mission without him.

Most people, if they could see what Rose did, would despair. Rose herself comes close. She knows, and has known for years that she'll go down fighting side by side with the person she loves most, knowing it's a losing battle, knowing that they'll both be killed. She knows that their children will be the last hope of a future for humanity, and knows just as surely that they will not live to meet them. But Rose is always finding new ways to be extraordinary. She throws herself into a deep black trance, flays her mind and flings it into the void, and when she awakens from visions of cemetery planets strewn with broken monuments and stalked by skeletal monsters, she brings with her a tiny crystal of hope.

Here is what she thinks, blinking back into conscious awareness of herself: She knows with perfect certainty that they will not live to meet their children, but not that they will never meet. Knowledge of the future is a trap, and after years of methodically testing the bars of that cage, she's finally found a loophole. In the game, the dead walk.

*

Dave's sword breaks when he tries to parry a whole damn statue. The monster troll queen floats the snapped off blade in front of him with a gesture, slowly rotating it to point at his heart, and then he's dueling his own weapon, parrying and yielding and evading, beating the blade aside each time she sends it diving for him like a missile. Beside him Rose is fighting a fucking dragon, needle-wands arcing and sparking with electric energy, teeth bared, and the Batterbitch just grins at them with all her needle teeth. They're throwing everything they have at her, fighting for their lives, but she's just playing.

Dave misses.

He doesn't feel pain as the blade goes through him, just the punch of force behind it. It makes him stagger, but he doesn't fall, though the agony that pours in after that one still moment makes him reel. He's holding his sword all wrong, realizes he'd grabbed the blade in blind, instinctive, ineffectual defense only when he feels it in his hands, slippery with blood, the sharp bite of the edge cutting into his palms like an echo, an afterthought. The rough drag of blade against bone is familiar, but he's never felt it like this, with his own ribs providing the resistance.

It's hard to breathe, to think. Getting run through really fucking sucks, he thinks, swaying on his feet. Zero out of ten, would not recommend. He thinks he should be able to tell from the angle of the sword how many vital organs have been perforated, and which ones, but his vision is blurring and he's in shock, he knows that, he's not an idiot, it's just. It's so hard to think through the pain. He can't breathe, and then he can't see, and then he can't keep himself upright.

Dying hurts.

A scream of raw fury follows him into the darkness. Rose.

*

Dave wakes up cold and aching, lying at Rose's side in a sticky pool of their mingled blood, the taste of it thick in his mouth. The snapped blade of his sword is still buried in his torso, but the pain is dulled and distant.

Rose's voice mutters incomprehensibly beside him, and icy fingers grasp at his. He turns his head to look at her and sees a nightmare with slate-gray skin and cold fire in her eyes, surrounded by a writhing aura of darkness. It's what a photo negative of a dark-haired Rose would look like, radiating dark light. She speaks, but he can't understand her; it doesn't even sound like words, just gibberish.

He blinks, and she's kneeling over him. How? He didn't see her move. His head is swimming. Nothing about this feels real.

She grips the broken blade and doesn't wince when it bites into her palm. The blood that runs in rivulets from her clenched fist is the same red as Dave's, shockingly bright against gray skin and silvery steel. He stares at it, seizing on it as the one comprehensible thing in the mad unreality of the moment. This Rose is dark and terrible but her blood is human, so she must still be Rose on the inside, where it matters. That's comforting, somehow.

She wrenches the sword out of him, and the pain is real enough to sever his tenuous grip on consciousness. An agonized scream echoes in his ears, and he's gone before he can wonder if it came from his own throat.

*

He wakes up choking on blood. Rose is leaning over him, covering his mouth with her hand as though to quiet him. He swallows convulsively, coughs, swallows again. Her hand on his face feels as heavy and cold as if she'd really turned into the statue of dark stone that she resembles, but her blood is hot and alive in his mouth, pulsing from the deep wound in her palm with every beat of her heart. Her face is solemn, her eyes intent, and she speaks a single eldritch word that sounds like a command and a plea and an apology all rolled into one.

Dave can't understand it, but he can tell she means it, and infer her meaning. Drink.

He does. He drinks until the flow ceases and Rose pulls her hand away, kisses him with corpse-cold lips, and collapses. The darkness around her wisps away like early morning fog dissolving in the light of day, leaving the shell of her body lying there pale and fragile, looking far older than her 56 years, with a faint smile on her lips. Her eyes are open and empty. The deep cut on her palm gapes bloodlessly. Dave feels sick to see her like that, but he can't muster the strength to turn his head; he shuts his eyes instead.

*

He wakes up in bed. Rose is there, propped on an elbow and leaning over him with mussed hair and perfect lipstick.

"I just had the most fucked up dream," Dave says, and stops. Rose doesn't look a day over thirty. He recognizes this room, remembers stumbling from the hotel bar with her and falling onto this king sized bed with his hands under her dress and her laughter in his mouth like it happened yesterday, but yesterday was twenty five years ago. "Go on," Rose says, smiling.

"Goddamnit," Dave says, "If this is some psychic troll bullshit, fuck off, okay, even I'm not dumb enough to fall for the 'it was all a dream' cop out when I'm probably floating in a fucking tank somewhere with wires coming out of my skull."

"I'll bet you say that to all the girls," Rose says, laughing, and when she rolls on top of him and kisses him she feels as real as he knows she's not.

"Really though," she says when she pulls away, breathless and panting, "tell me about this dream you had."

"God, I wish it was a dream," Dave says. "You'd have a fucking field day analyzing the part where I got skewered with my own sword. And I would be totally down to listen to everything you had to say about the deep seated anxiety about my sexuality reflected by what is clearly a metaphor for getting fucked to death with my own severed dick, if it hadn't, you know, actually happened."

"You actually got-" Rose starts, and he smacks her in the face with a pillow.

"I actually got stabbed with a piece of my own sword," Dave says. "Which is not a metaphor for anything, because it literally happened, in reality, and I refuse to entertain the idea that the Batterbitch's actions are guided by my subconscious."

"Disappointing, but fair," Rose says. "I was hoping you wouldn't catch on so quickly. I love that this is how you remember me, but it's been a long time since I've been this Rose."

"You've always been this Rose to me," Dave tells her, and it's true.

*

He wakes up stiff and sore, with a headache that feels like someone's taking a hammer to the inside of his skull. For a confused moment he thinks he must have partied too hard and passed out on the pool deck—fuck, he's getting too old for that sort of shindig and he needs to stay on his guard, too, now that shit's getting real with the whole alien invasion thing—but no, no, that was decades ago. This isn't a fucking hangover, and wherever he is smells more like a slaughterhouse than the side of a pool.

He cautiously cracks an eye open and winces at the brightness of the sun through his shades. It's low on the horizon, a warm afternoon glow that turns Rose's pale hair to gold. It's a beautiful effect, one he'd tried dozens of times to capture on camera.

His vision blurs into soft focus. He doesn't blink the tears away.

When the sun has finished setting, he peels himself off the bloody pavement, gathers her up, and takes her home.

Chapter Text

Dave wraps the bloodless body in a lilac cotton sheet and buries it in the woods behind her house after sunset. Rose deserves a better funeral, he thinks, but he knows she wouldn’t want anyone else to see her like this, would rather vanish without a trace than lose a shred of dignity or mystery in the eyes of the public. He likes the idea that by concealing the evidence of her death he’s gifting her a kind of immortality; at least the legend of her will live on.

He drinks half a bottle of gin and drifts into an uneasy sleep on an uncomfortable sofa in Rose's chilly and immaculate living room.

He wakes to a dull headache and a teasing smile on the lips of his oldest friend. She looks perfectly natural perched on the ottoman, but his back and shoulders are still sore from digging her grave and he can’t bear to play along with the memory this time.

"What the hell did you do, Rose?" he asks. "What am I doing here? I mean, shit, I did not expect to survive that fight. I figured it was a fucking last stand, going out together, you know? Thought for sure she’d killed us both."

Rose's smile flickers and dies, and she sighs deeply. "I must regretfully inform you that you were correct in that assessment," she says. "She did, in fact, kill both of us. As for what the hell I did…" She shrugs elegantly. "I don’t remember the details. Suffice it to say that at the last, I found that I could not accept your death at her hands. Nor my own, I suppose."

"So you made an impulsive turn to necromancy," Dave says. "Cool, that makes sense and isn’t worrying at all."

"Well, no," Rose says. "Fun fact about necromancy! Raising the dead isn’t the point of it at all. More of a methodology than an end goal. If you look at the etymology of the word, you’ll find that the suffix -mancy derives from the ancient Greek word for divination. Prophecy. An area in which I will admit to being particularly gifted, but not through any commerce with the dead."

"So..?"

"I didn't bring you back in hopes of gaining knowledge of future events, so it wasn't technically necromancy. I just want to make that clear."

God, he loves her. "Rose, has anyone ever told you you're insufferably pedantic?"

"Quite frequently, as you well know." She sighs again. "I’m not being purposefully evasive, Dave, I really don’t know how I did it. I’m not certain I did it at all; from what I could see of your memories, it appears as though I gave myself over to the dark gods almost entirely."

"Almost."

"Well, I’m here, am I not? In spirit if not in flesh. I don’t feel as though my soul has been devoured by unknowable horrors. I’m not a ghost in the traditional sense, since it seems I cannot manifest anywhere but in your mind, but I am more than a memory, Dave. I am sure of that."

He wakes again with tears on his face and the activation code for the transportalizer in the subterranean lab burning in his mind.

*

Dave wanders through empty worlds for days, hollow with hunger. It's a bit like sleepwalking, he thinks; his awareness of his surroundings waxes and ebbs, dreamlike. He knows what—who—he's looking for, but not how to find him, or whether he's even here.

The problem is that time is tricky, here.

He knows that the game started back in 2011, right as the Condesce staged her debut. That media circus neatly eclipsed the news of a vanished house in a Washington suburb and strange seismic activity in the Pacific, but Rose already had a stack of binders full of meticulously curated evidence by then, cross-referenced with over a decade's worth of spiral bound dream journals. She knew what to look for, and she found it—confirmation that the Crocker girl and old lady English's grandson had successfully entered the game.

It doesn't make sense for him to be able to follow them a full quarter century later. But it doesn't make sense that a game that's already been played won't start for almost four hundred years, and it doesn't make sense for a dead man to be walking around with his best friend's ghost in his head, looking for a brother he's never met. And anyway, Dave got used to the nonsensical years ago.

He sees a skinny kid with pointy sunglasses and a pointy hairstyle and a katana in his hand, staring into space. He's dressed in black jeans and a tank top, and just below his shoulder—

Dave's mouth drops open. "Holy shit, is that Hella Jeff?"

*

Dirk shifts into a fighting stance automatically and then freezes.

"It totally is," Dave says. "Fuck. Can we pretend I introduced myself in a marginally cooler, less self-absorbed way? I'm—"

—our bro, Hal flashes in front of Dirk's eyes. In the remarkably well-preserved flesh. No, you're not tripping balls or dreaming, unless someone's figured out how to implement cross-platform support for hallucinations. The dude is literally standing right there. You're welcome.

TT: That's what you'd say if this was a hallucination.

TT: Please. If this were all a figment of your overactive imagination, Dave would be way smoother and a lot less clothed.

TT: You're not helping.

TT: You're not listening.

Hal plays back the last few seconds of audio at 2x speed—DirkohmygodDirkit'sreallyyouI'veimaginedmeetingyousomanytimes—

"—but I never thought it would happen, fuck, you're right in front of me and I can still hardly believe you're real."

"I'm real," Dirk says. "I'm, I just. Are you? You died, like—"

"Three hundred and eighty nine years ago, and in twenty five years, yeah," Dave says. "Uh. Some fucked up shit went down. But right now, I'm here." He opens his arms, half a 'what can I say?' sort of shrug, half an invitation.

Dirk takes it.

He's warm in Dave's arms. Dave hugs him tight, feeling the tension in his wiry frame, his breath puffing quick and uneven against his own cool skin, his heart thundering in his narrow chest. His mouth floods with saliva. Dirk feels like the only real thing in the world, warm and wonderful, shockingly alive. Dave pulls him closer, breathing him in, and presses his lips to the pounding pulse in his throat.

Dirk tastes of salt, at first, and then of iron. His blood is rich and hot and he moans as Dave drinks from him, and clutches him tighter.

TT: No fucking way.

Dirk isn't paying attention. His eyes are shut tight and he's gasping, clinging to Dave's shoulders. This is the hottest thing that has ever happened to him, or maybe to anyone, ever, and he can't bring himself to care that it seems increasingly unlikely to actually be happening. It's too good. The pain of Dave's teeth in his throat floods his system with endorphins, and the feeling of strong arms caging him in and holding him up hits him almost as hard if not harder, lonely and touch-starved as he is. Self-consciousness has fled with the last shreds of his self control, and he doesn't even try to stop himself from grinding eagerly against Dave's thigh and pleading wordlessly for more, more, more, until he shudders and comes in his jeans with a sharp cry.

Dave comes back to himself with his brother's blood smeared around his mouth and dripping down his chin, and almost drops him in horror.

Dirk sags in his arms, his own arms loosening their desperate cling to hang at his sides, head lolling back, body limp as a rag doll or an unstrung marionette. He's gone ghost-pale, breath shallow, pulse weak and thready. Dave reaches a shaking hand to his face and recoils; Dirk's skin feels cool, and his own fingers are warm and flushed with life against his pallid cheek. Dirk's lost so much blood, too much blood—

Dave takes his shades off with a vague idea of checking his eyes' responsiveness, and is immediately distracted by the red glow flashing rhythmically from the inside of the left lens.

TT: DAVE.
TT: BRO.
TT: DAVE.
TT: ATTENTION, DAVE.
TT: WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING. LOOK AT ME, DAVE.
TT: DAVE. TELL ME YOU CAN PILOT A HOVERBOARD AND FOLLOW SIMPLE INSTRUCTIONS.