Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Your world fills with exceptionally confusing nonsense.

You have no idea what the fuck is going on. What even is your body doing, what the hell, it feels weird and not normal and you can’t really move except for a sort of demented squirm and you’re pretty sure you don’t have your shades on and everything is stupidly bright and blurry, what the hell? There’s so much noise, as well, a couple of voices that sound familiar and a fair amount of baby bawling. Everything sucks, it sucks so badly and you have no idea what’s going on. You flail a bit, and cast your vision about, but it’s all still so much blurrier than it should be and that rustles your jimmies something fierce, and suddenly it’s actually very difficult to hold back the impulse to start weeping, what the fuck. You valiantly resist the impulse with herculean force of will, but you’re pretty sure an embarrassing lip tremble occurs. This scandalises you thoroughly but it’s actually very difficult to focus on the egregious loss of your cool because your brain isn’t working properly.

“Dave, um, little Dave, calm down! Oh god don’t you start crying too!” Suddenly there is a face in front of you. It is a very familiar face. It is a John Egbert face, and you stop writhing and just stare at that blurry yet obviously Egbertian face because when did John become a giant? Then you process what he said, but it’s difficult, it’s actually really difficult to think straight through all the unhappy fuzz. You get the gist of it anyway and feel a bit indignant, because you’re pretty sure that crying isn’t a thing that you do and John should know that by now.

“What,” you try to say, but it comes out more like “whgrrblt!” and you discover that speaking is another thing that isn’t working very well.

“Oh good,” John says, sounding relieved as he picks you up, like you’re a fucking puppy or something. You are abruptly cradled in the crook of his arm, and you stare up at him in consternation. You just don’t know what to think about this. Face. Face. Egbert face. It’s weirdly transfixing. You feel like it’s a good idea to look at it, but you’re not sure why. You frown slightly up at Giant John. “Dave, can you take your little-you?” and why does he sound like he isn’t talking to – oh. Right.

You observe as Giant Future Dave obligingly strides over in a manner befitting his name, and receives you from Giant Egbert. You are now looking at his face. It has iShades on. You feel very jealous. He looks like he’s wearing his God Tier pyjamas, and there’s something weird and soft looking folded on his back, poking over his shoulders. It’s blurry, so you have difficulty telling precisely what.

“Yo.” He greets you, looking down.

“Yglo.” You respond, feeling very frowny, because what is going on, just what?

“You are a baby Strider.” He tells you. “The first thing we all remember of the universe is waking up all newly ecto-cloned. We’re going to stick you on your meteor soon.”

You continue to stare at him, slightly dumbfounded. You’re not sure if it’s sensible to take future you seriously in this, but it makes enough sense to break through your brain fuzz. It feels sort of like trying to think while chronically sleep deprived and dehydrated, but without the tiredness, thirst, and headaches. “…Glblool.” You say, eventually.

Another face forces its way into your field of vision. It’s John again, and he appears to be juggling his own younger-self. “Hi Dave and little Dave! Say hello to mini-me!”

With genuine effort, you crane your neck to look properly at Small John. He looks at you pitifully with a trembling lower lip, his eyes all huge and blue and shit, someone should slap a warning label on him. He’s like one of those really pitiful looking puppies that tend to completely commandeer your feels as soon as they look at you.

“aaaaayv!” he wails at you, and it does sound sort of like your name. Damn him for having slightly superior grasp of his talking thing.

You apparently can’t make an ‘s’ sound very convincingly, so you settle for “uurp?” You’re pretty sure the meaning gets lost in translation though.

John puts Small John onto the floor with exceptional care. He then presents you, very carefully, with those same aviators that had been dramatically oversized on a twelve year old and therefore utterly dwarf the face of the creature you have become. Nonetheless, you relax slightly upon acquiring them, even though you actually can’t see worth a damn if you actually wear them. “thhnkyuh?” you utter, still pretty damn perplexed about the situation at large.

Presumably Future John beams at you. “You’re welcome!” He says cheerfully. “I thought you might appreciate not having to wear pointy anime shades for twelve years, so!”

Wait. What. You garble demandingly at him. That sounds suspiciously like he expects you to go through another childhood with Bro and you just flat out can’t think about that, your brain just doesn’t seem capable of processing much at all, let alone shit as nuanced as that.

“Joooohn!” A somewhat impatient voice which sounds like Jade calls from out of your field of vision. “We need to get the babies to our meteors! Hurry up, little me is being a total pain!”

John startles, and scoops himself off of the floor. Small John stares at you imploringly. You think he looks very confused. You attempt to shrug at him, but your shoulders are all little and not very good at it. John whisks John away and as they disappear you hear Little John start wailing. “Are the other four done?”

“Yeah, they’re all buckled in to their respective rocks…Oh – fuck!” Comes Jade’s curse a moment later. “I knew I was forgetting something.”

The Future Dave arms holding you twitch a bit. “Jade. What the hell. Did your ecto-twin just-“

“Teleport off to parts unknown? Yeah.” Jade reappears where you can see her, and she looks. Well. She’s still part dog, but not quite as furry as you remember. Still has the ears, though.

“Um. Is that meant to happen?” John queries from somewhere to the left, his small self still crying.

Jade offers a slightly embarrassed giggle. “I guess now I know why I’m technically the youngest. I forgot about that.” After a pause, she adds “I’ll teleport to Earth and Grandpa eventually. It’ll just…take a while.”

“Oh my god, Jade. You lost your baby you?” John sounds appalled.

“Blame baby me, she’s the one that teleported off somewhere! And, um, you should really get your ecto-clones to the meteors, guys, the Reckoning is about to start.” She points at something.

“At least it took more than a day this time.” Future Dave comments. “Definite improvement on our first go.”

“Dave, anything would be an improvement on our first go, anything. Except maybe all that-“

“Guys! Reckoning! Babies! Meteors!” Jade barks at them, and suddenly you’re moving.

“We’ve got loads of time, it’s fine! Where’s Rose, anyway?”

“She got her ecto-clone to the meteor after only a couple minutes of lollygagging, so follow her example and get a move on!”

There is a short, bumpy interlude of movement, which then draws to a close. You look up at Future You, overwhelming confusion giving up the reins to some pretty sincere apprehension. He looks down at you, and though he’s mostly expressionless, you hear a bit of sympathy in his voice. “Sorry, little dude. This is going to kind of suck.” And he puts you down. His words do not alleviate your apprehension in the least.

Off to the side, you hear John exclaim “It’s okay, mini-me! You’re like Superman! It’ll be over before you know it.”

“What he said,” Future Dave agrees, and tweaks something on your back. “Heh. Chicken fuzz,” he comments, and you can’t figure out what he’s talking about.

And then he’s gone. This panics you more than you care to admit. You hear John murmuring something off to the side, and also the vague sounds of Rose and Jade conversing, but those fade as well.

Then it’s silent, except for some wailing that sounds pretty far off.

==>

Suddenly things aren’t silent any more. They’re not silent at all, and everything is hot, and air is screaming through your ears and you think your leg might be burning. You do an acrobatic fucking pirouette off the handle and start hollering uncontrollably, cradling your aviators like they’re your salvation on God’s green and potentially existent Earth. You’ll take the time to feel chagrined about it later, but for now you’re a baby whose brain isn’t very good at the keeping of cools and you think you might be on a flaming meteor bound for hitting the ground really hard, and that’s fucking frightening.

Embarrassingly, it’s probably your own panic that dooms you. You’d have survived the impact just fine – the aviators did, after all. But you’re so profoundly ruffled by the events unfolding that you hurl a bit, but there’s nowhere for it to go and you can’t breathe-

==>

When you next come to awareness, it’s to a godawful burning feeling in your chest. It hurts to breathe. It hurts a lot. But you can do it. You clench your fingers pitifully around the aviators, to confirm they’re still there.

“Oh, thank God.” A voice breathes above you, and you freeze because that’s familiar.

You open your eyes.

It’s Bro.

“Shit, kid, don’t do that. Finding a baby in the wreckage of a goddamn meteor is one thing, but finding a dead baby is downright depressing.”

You stare at Bro. Your breath wheezes a bit as it comes out.

“Shit.” He says again. “You’re gonna need to see a doctor, aren’t you…but, also, uh.” He frowns at you. Actually frowns. “I…don’t know how much of a good idea that is.”

You don’t quite compute. Sick baby = get medical help, or that’s what you assumed at any rate. You’ve been coming to realise just how crappy your upbringing was recently, but for fuck’s sake, you think you actually did suffocate on the way down and died, and he’s not going to take you to a baby doctor or something?

He stares at you for a while, and prods at something on your back. It tickles. You kick out – except, wait. That’s not your leg. Or an arm. What…?

“Fucking angel baby, man.” Bro mutters to you. “Angel baby with shades. Are you an alien, or the second coming, or what? Pretty sure no one said anything about Jesus having wings. You’re probably an alien.”

“Ahffk?” You inquire, but it comes out as a pretty pitiful whining sound and you start coughing half way though and damn that hurts. You can’t help but start bawling, damned baby physiology, and shit, that hurts even more-

“Okay, okay, doctor it is then…This is probably going to suck.”

You have no idea what the hell he is talking about, you recently died and it fucking hurts, you hate being a baby and you hate being an infirm one even more, you don’t want to go through another Bro upbringing and everything sucks so much, it’s fucking inconceivable. Through a lot of effort, and also negative associations of having recently suffocated, you manage not to cry. But you do end up emitting a thoroughly displeased warble, which comes out sort of choked and whistly on account of the recent choking.

Apparently Bro had a decent grasp of flash-stepping even in his early twenties, because the world blurs around you for quite a long time, and suddenly hospital. You feel slightly relieved at the sight of it, and hope they can give you some medication or something, because pain.

You don’t quite understand why Bro seems so intent on hiding as much of you as possible from surrounding people.

“Hey,” He says to the person at the A&E desk. “Uh. I found this baby abandoned in a street. I think he’s having trouble breathing.”

After that, things sort of get weird.

==>

There are three doctors and six nurses in the room and you’re pretty sure you heard something about the police being called, too. You stare balefully at the oddly hesitant medical staff as they cluster around, being all uncertain and flustered, and you notice that Bro seems increasingly uncomfortable. Not that he shows it much, but you’ve got enough experience with that guy to tell.

One of the doctors asks Bro a lot of questions while the other inspects you. He does the expected breathing related stuff, and frowns at that, then starts prodding at your back. Pulling at something. Two somethings? It feels like he’s pulling on your arms, but not quite, because you know where your arms are and it’s not on your back. He pulls your not-arms in and out, very carefully, several times, until it gets annoying and you snatch them back.

“Well,” The doctor who had been examining you interrupts the questioning one. “There are signs of severe respiratory trauma here, more than I would expect a child this young to survive, but there’s also no sign of fluid in the lungs or any obstructions at all. I’ll prescribe him some painkillers and anti-inflammatories, and with luck, that should be all he needs.”

Bro turns to the doctor in question. “And the…other stuff?”

“Yes. Well,” The somewhat helpful doctor coughs awkwardly. “Both…wings, appear to be healthy. I am not an ornithologist, but the full range of motion appears to be there. The feathers seem to be baby down for the moment, but it may be possible that he…fledges, as he grows older.”

Wait. What?

Bro nods shortly, looking very serious despite the bullshit at work here. Fucking wings. What?

You hurriedly stare down at your arm to confirm that it isn’t, in fact, bright fucking orange. It isn’t. It’s just your typical pale skin, no incandescent eye-searing glow there. You’re not Davesprite. You’re Dave. After a bit of panicked fumbling at your sense of time, you can confirm that you’re in the alpha timeline, too. You just…have wings, apparently?

Oh shit, is that what you’d seen on Future Dave’s back?

“Mr…Strider,” The Somewhat Helpful Doctor says uneasily. “Can I…that is, if you found the child on his own, and he does not have any family to go to…”

Bro stares at you, and holds out his arms expectantly. After a pause, you are obligingly passed back to him, and he stares at you some more. “I’ll take him,” he says, sounding almost baffled by his own words.

You would be more upset at this, except you’re starting to get seriously fucking tired.

==>

You think you might have fallen asleep or something, because the next thing you know there are police uniforms everywhere and Bro seems to be giving a statement of some sort.

“...you head to the impact site, Mr Strider?”

“To see if anyone had been hurt, I guess?” Bro shrugs. “It was pretty late and no one else was nearby, so.”

“And where did you find the child?”

Everything goes along a fairly predictable vein, with Bro being honest and accurate except for the part where you’d been straight in the centre of the impact crater, and not in some nearby wreckage. It culminates in Bro agreeing to a background check so that he can take you while they wait for any missing persons reports. But it seems to more or less be a formality, because the more they mention keeping you overnight in the hospital the more defensive Bro gets, until finally he says “Look. Once the shock of a baby with wings wears off, I wouldn’t put it past some of those quacks to get a bit too interested, you get what I’m sayin’? He’s just some kid with no name, records, or family – it would be easy as shit to disappear him. He’s not staying at the hospital.” It’s probably the largest number of words you’ve ever heard him string together without it being a rap.

Someone in the corner starts blustering about professionalism, but the officer nearest to you looks almost approving.

And that, apparently, is that.

It seems to be early hours of the morning by the time you leave, and Bro looks completely exhausted. He’s not the only one. But apparently not too exhausted to flash-step his way to a local store and come away armed with diapers and baby formula.

“Sorry, little dude,” He mutters to you as he proceeds up several flights of stairs. “Gonna have to wait a bit longer for a crib and changing table and shit.” He opens a door.

It’s your apartment.

==>

The place isn’t exactly the same as you remember. There aren’t any puppets about, and the piles of shitty swords aren’t in the usual places. It’s still a complete tip, though, and that seems to worry Bro.

“Shit,” He mutters, placing you carefully on the futon. “What the hell am I doing with a kid? This is a fucking terrible idea.” You agree wholeheartedly, because you soiled your undies about twenty minutes ago, and because you’ve declined to bawl about it, he doesn’t seem to have noticed yet. You should probably yell at him about that, get his attention or something. But it’s really fucking embarrassing to have no control of when you shit, okay? You’d rather keep it to yourself a bit longer, even if it’s really uncomfortable and making you feel totally miserable.

You’re not sure what Bro is doing, but it involves a lot of clattering about and occasional swearing. Every five minutes or so he comes over to you and looms over the futon, staring, and you think he might be a bit freaked out by the suddenly having a child thing. You think that trying to consider what the fuck is going on and why you’re a baby with wings would be a good idea, but the more time that passes with your diaper full, the more unhappy you get until thinking just isn’t something you can do.

“…bo! Gtthuhfko’rr!” You shout eventually, and you hear a loud clatter and some sudden profanity in response. Bro is there in literally a flash, staring down at you in consternation. How has he not smelled your crap yet?

“…You cool, little man?” he questions, and he actually sounds unsure.

You flap your hand in the vague direction of your ass, and make a sound of displeasure. It comes out sort of like a croak.

He stares at you uncomprehendingly for a while. But then you guess he’s been standing there long enough that the smell has time to hit him, and realization comes upon his face like the light of fucking dawn. “Oh, right.” He mutters, hauling you up with a small grimace. “Shit.” Astute fucking observation, Bro. Yes, it’s shit.

He yanks the bag of diapers from by the door and heads to the bathroom. To preserve your dignity, you try vehemently to avoid thinking about the proceedings that follow, but you are in the end vastly more comfortable than before and that’s the important thing.

As Bro carries you back to the futon, you realise that the apartment is actually looking sort of tidy. What the fuck. Is Bro cleaning?

You are so dumbfounded by this happenstance that…well, you stare a bit more idiotically, you guess. There’s really not much to do as a baby, and not a lot of variety in how you can express your shock.

When you’re back on the futon, you attempt to think around the fuzz in your brain and contemplate the recent happenings in your life. It really isn’t easy. You guess baby brains aren’t good at complex thought. If you make an effort, you can have a string of pretty basic thoughts, but it’s hard to arrange them. You do your best, though.

You and baby John had been in a lab, before. It’s already getting hard to remember what went down there, your infant memory is truly shit. Future Dave had been there. He mentioned ecto-clones. So you’re an ecto-baby this time, too? Does that mean the game is going to happen again? You thought you were meant to get some sort of reward or something, though. Shit, it’s hard to remember. Ugh.

So, you all won, and everyone tried to enter the new universe? You remember there being lots of people. Like, probably at least twenty trolls, a lot of sprites, and quite a few humans, too? So why are you suddenly an ecto-baby, recently acquired by Bro from a meteor crater? And why do you have wings?

You flex said wings experimentally. You’re laying on them, on your back, and it’s actually pretty uncomfortable. All thought of trying to figure out what’s going on immediately leaves your immensely distractible infant mind, and instead you try to shuffle about into a more comfortable position. Infant mobility is seriously shitty. You manage to roll onto your front, though, with the use of several sets of limbs. Including your wings. You should be able to crawl, right? You don’t think you’re a newborn. You’re pretty sure that newborns can’t move their necks, or do much of anything, really.

You lay on your front, flexing wings experimentally. It feels good to stretch them out, they’ve been all cramped. You try to wrap them around your sides so that you can look at them, and observe that they seem to be covered in fluff. Baby bird feathers. That is very uncool.

You turn your attention to the floor. You’re on a futon, so it isn’t very far away. You reckon you can get to it alright. You successfully crawl to the edge of the futon and then reach over the edge for the ground, but what happens next is more of an undignified tumble than it is a successful descent. Nonetheless, you arrive on the floor uninjured, and feel exceptionally satisfied with yourself. Something nags at you. Weren’t you supposed to be thinking about something? But…nah, the floor is more interesting.

You sit back and stare around. Bro seems to be clattering around in the next room. Bro is such a dick. You think it’s a bad thing to leave babies unattended, so his doing it is probably another sign of him being a dick. You really dislike that guy.

You grimace in his general direction, and also emit a croaky sound of displeasure. Then you start crawling around aimlessly for a bit, until you realise that there should be a full length mirror in the bathroom so maybe you can see what you look like now? You crawl in the appropriate direction, and then stop. Foiled. Foiled by a door.

This door is the worst thing ever and you want it to die.

You hit it with your ickle fists for a bit, but it hurts, so you stop. You wonder if you have anything in your Sylladex that could help.

Oh, hey, Sylladex! How did you not think of that before?

You wave impatiently at the air, summoning the coded inventory. And sweet, all your stuff is there, just as you remembered. Miscellaneous random shit and all. You’re not sure any of it would help here, though. But maybe your swordkind? Or 1/2swordkind? You think you remember fixing it, but you’re not sure.

Fuck yes, Caledfwch.

Your joy at the presence of the sword dwindles rapidly when you discover that your stubby infant arms really can’t wield it. At all. Not happening. You can wrap your chubby fingers around the hilt but that bitch refuses to be lifted with pathetic infant muscle.

You think you really hate being a baby.

==>

Bro freaks out slightly when he discovers you half way across the apartment with a random, non-shitty sword at your feet. You hastily captchalogue the thing before he can confiscate it, and wish you’d thought to do that with your shades, whose location is currently unknown.

“Fucking jesus,” Bro says, carrying you to his room. “This is why people get those baby pen things, I guess.” And then he sits you down on his surprisingly tidy floor while he orders a load of baby crap from the internet, judging by what you can see of the screen.

You swiftly focus on more important matters though, because shades.

They’re up on the very inaccessible desk.

You never took advantage of your god tier flying thing like the others did, but you make exceptions for emergencies.

It’s once your shades are firmly in hand and you’re floating level with Bro’s shoulders that you realise, welp. Seems god tier powers are working. Also, you might have broken Bro. Should probably do something about that.

You captchalogue the precious shades, then lower yourself back to the floor.

You sit and stare up at Bro for a while, wondering if he’s going to say anything, but nope. Seems he’s happy to freak out in silence.

You sit on the floor and also freak out a little. Because there are better times and places to explore your god tier powers than in front of Bro, not even a day after he picked you up, but somehow you failed to think of that. You think that you really hate being a baby.

==>

Bro doesn’t end up doing anything except freak out quietly for a while, which gives you time to stop freaking out, and eventually he just turns to his computer and starts streaming MLP. You want to mock him for it, but your communications systems aren’t quite up to it, so you settle for snorting at him instead. He tells you, briefly, that MLPs are the shit, and that snorting is not the correct response to witnessing them, and returns to watching.

Thinking about communications systems makes you think of the other god tier powers. You can still tell precisely what time it is, and your abilities don’t feel any different to usual, so you reckon time travel is within your power too. But what about that power all god tiers have, the communications thing? Gift of gab, or something? None of you ever really used it if there was something else available, so it isn’t something you’ve messed with a lot.

Cautiously, you poke around in your powers until you find something that feels right, and then you activate it.

You are immediately assaulted with a load of nonsense noise.

It sounds like at least five babies all trying to shout babble at each other at once. On closer inspection, you realise that several of the voices don’t sound human. All sort of…mewly and clicky. So the trolls did make it. Well, you think. It’s either troll grubs or an unexpected incursion of god tier insect cats, so you’ll assume that it's troll grubs. Are they on Earth or Alternia or what? Hell if you know.

Considering it’s all baby voice, you can’t make out anything familiar, and from what you can tell there’s no actual communication going on anyway, just frantic babble. You cut off the gift of the gab channel, with the first twinges of a headache making themselves known.

You notice that you feel very hungry, and stare up at Bro consideringly. You think you could probably obtain your own food, since you can fly. And since the cat’s already out of the bag on that one, there’s no point in not flying around. It’s a lot more convenient than crawling.

You shrug, and float over to the doorknob, pawing at it with clumsy and very chubby fingers. Well, shit. Dexterity and strength of digits are both necessary for the opening of doors, even if you can levitate yourself around.

A moment later, you are plucked out of the air by a panicking guy in pointy anime shades. “Holy shit,” He says, “I’m going to need to put a fucking roof on your baby pen.”

You shrug. If you have to suffer the indignity of being an infant who is mostly dependent on Bro, then he has to suffer the hardship of dealing with a total pain in the ass god baby.

Seems fair.

Chapter Text

You try floating off a few more times, but Bro gets tired of it and ties some wool around your chubby baby foot, looping the other end around his wrist. He gave you a fair amount of leeway with the wool, you can still float around the room, but not get any further. This pisses you off immensely. You are hungry, goddammit. And most half responsible adults would feed their children, not drive them to food-seeking levitation, for fuck’s sake.

You notice that floating around while attached to a string makes you bear an unwelcome resemblance to a really weird balloon, and you descend to the floor immediately. After several minutes of stewing and glowering, it occurs to you that most babies cry when they require sustenance, and also Bro is not psychic.

Huh.

You sit in somewhat less sullen contemplation for a good five more minutes. This is a little embarrassing, because this isn’t exactly complex thinking but it takes you a really long time. Eventually, though, you come to the conclusion that if you’re not going to cry, you’re going to need to let Bro know when you need something.

You nod thoughtfully, then float over and sit on Bro’s keyboard. The computer starts making displeased sounds, pretty much what you’d expect when sitting on a load of keys.

Bro stares at you. “Yeah?” He offers, after a moment.

You consider the most appropriate method of communication, then open your mouth and point to it emphatically. It’s a pretty clear signal, so Bro just nods and picks you up, heading to the kitchen.

You sit more or less still while he prepares some baby formula. You eye the proceedings warily. Having been raised on MREs and junk food, you’re not exactly picky about what you ingest, but powdered milk formula does not strike you as especially appetising. You wonder if you’re at the age when you should start eating solids. After a few minutes, Bro presents you with a bottle of baby formula. It’s not even a baby bottle, it’s an empty water bottle. You roll your eyes, and reach out to the thing, but Bro just shoves it in your face instead.

You splutter a bit, drinking the formula more or less on reflex to avoid choking to death again, and want to protest that you can hold your own fucking milk bottle, thank you very much. But you’re not sure if that’s actually true, so you sit tight and take your formula like a man. It tastes okay, you guess. Nothing amazing, but you do feel a bit less terribly hungry as you drink it.

You start to feel a bit bloated and sloshy after a while so you slap the bottle away, splashing baby milk everywhere. Heh. Whoops.

Bro makes a face, sighs, and cleans it up.

==>

A while later Bro approaches you with your medications, and wow, he’s actually sort of doing his job. He looks pretty fucking grim about it, though, which you sort of understand. Babies and pets can be dicks about taking their meds, even if they’d actually die without them, so he’s probably not looking forward to the experience. You look forward to proving his expectations false, though, because your throat does actually hurt and you’re not a total moron to spit out medicine that will help you.

You open your mouth obligingly when presented with a spoon of unpleasant-smelling syrup, and okay yeah, that is some serious ugh hitting your nostrils, but you understand that medicine is important so you guess you’ll just bite the bullet and-

Holy shit it tastes disgusting-

You pause, contemplating the events of the last few seconds.

Well, seems like you just sprayed medicinal syrup all over Bro, who does not look surprised in the least.

Bro pours another spoonful. Warned by your previous experience, you think you can manage it this time. You ingest the syrup.

It’s foul. It’s so foul. You wonder what you all spent so much time fussing about in the last universe because this is clearly the greatest weapon anyone could ever bring to bear against anything, Lord English included – it is the foulest and most terrible instrument of doom that anyone could ever ever hope to find, ever. You think Jack Noir, having been prototyped with god dog, would be especially susceptible to this nasty shit, probably the smell alone would be enough to kill him, what the hell were you thinking with all those dramatic pitched assaults against the various antagonists?

This is the one fucking serum to rule them all. And it doesn’t just rule them, it hunts down all the other diabolical poisons and tinctures in their sleep and then garrotes them, with razor wire, and the razor blades are made of the blood and tears of tortured orphans who cried for mercy for at least forty days before they perished and their blood and tears became the metaphorical razor blades garrotting any foolish poisons who dared strive for the title of Deadliest Motherfucker Around. Clearly someone should have told Vriska about humanity’s most terrible weapon, the dreaded medicine syrup, and let her unleash it on your hapless, omnipotent, interdimensional, universe-rending foes. The poor bastards wouldn’t have stood a chance.

There’s probably a comically exaggerated expression of disgust on your face, and you don’t even care.

Bro looks pleasantly surprised by the unexpected development of you actually ingesting that foul, evil healing substance more or less willingly. It is when he goes to pour another spoonful that you know, deep in your little god tier ecto-baby heart, that evil exists, and it is here.

You spare a beleaguered glance to the heavens, but for one thing it doesn’t seem like anyone is listening, and for another it’s just ceiling, no heavens to be found here. So much for you being an angel baby.

You sigh, and resign yourself to your fate.

==>

When Bro goes to bed, he makes damned sure that your tether is in place, but he does make an effort to clear bed space for you so that’s alright, you guess. He takes off his shades to sleep and that weirds you out a bit, but then he turns over and buries his face in a pillow so you can pretend his eyes are still covered. You sleep for a while, and wake up. Bro is still asleep and there isn’t much to do, so you go back to sleep. You wake up again and feel a bit pissy, because apparently babies aren’t good at sleeping in long blocks or actually ever feeling rested and that’s annoying and whoops, you almost started crying there. Goddamn baby reflexes.

You congratulate yourself on resisting that stupid baby response and go back to sleep, though it takes you a while to manage it. When you wake up it’s morning, but Bro still isn’t up, and you have this feeling that you’re going to crap yourself soon but you also don’t think it’s something you can really hold in.

You inspect the tether tied to your ankle. You also squint at the closed door at the far wall. You leaf through your Sylladex in search of anything that might help, but you’re not sure there is anything you can make good use of at this age.

As you resign yourself to crapping your diaper, you observe that you’ve been resigning yourself to a lot of stuff lately, and you wonder if you can train Bro out of some shit. It’s not like you’ll just fly off into the distance if he doesn’t tie you down…Well, probably. Maybe. Depends on how bored you are. But he could at least leave the bedroom and bathroom doors open so you can float over to crap in the toilet rather than humiliating yourself several times a day.

You consider time travel. You also consider shitting on Bro’s keyboard, but you’re not sure you’re that irritated at him yet. And also you’re not sure if you’re physically capable of removing your diaper, dammit. You have another look through your Sylladex for anything helpful, and of course it’s full of a few awesome things, like shades, but mostly miscellaneous bullshit, because what else would you keep in a Sylladex?

In a stroke of genius, it occurs to you to weaponise your Sylladex.

You switch to a stack modus, like John used way back when. Man, that shit was stupid. You’re significantly better at coding than twelve year old John was, thank god, so you split everything into several separate stacks and start arranging them appropriately. First on your order of business is arranging a stack full of random broken swords, shuriken, knives, and other sharp shit. You bring that stack around to the forefront and, arranging yourself in a strategic door-facing position, you are struck by the genius ball and captchalogue your foot tether to the sharp stuff stack.

As the sharp stuff stack is full, a Sylladex card full of throwing knives ejects its contents at the door with frankly alarming speed. Some go straight through the relatively crappy door while others just stick into the wood. You glance quickly at Bro and notice that he is stirring. Shit. You captchalogue the knives to the sharp stuff pile and quickly rotate through the stack in this manner until the door is thoroughly aggressed and Bro is very certainly waking up and staring at you with the most pole-axed expression you’ve ever seen on a Strider’s face. The fact that his eyes are exposed (ew) probably makes it easier for you to discern this expression, but still, heh. You feel fucking accomplished.

You make a flight for freedom through the splintery hole in the savaged door, zooming around the corner to the (fuck yes) open bathroom door, whereupon you captchalogue your diaper, propelling some ninja stars into the wall, and proceed to float above the toilet bowl to do your business.

Bro: 0
Pain in the ass god tier baby Dave: 1

Of course, it takes approximately four seconds for Bro to flash step around the apartment until he locates you in the bathroom, shitting more smugly than anyone has ever shat before.

Most kids don’t learn how to use a Sylladex until they’re at least seven. They start the basic coding stuff in kindergarten, but it takes most kids forever to get even vaguely functional with it. You think that the implications of a baby who not only has a Sylladex but can arrange and weaponise the thing are starting to occur to Bro.

You are so glad you thought of captchaloguing your foot tether to get rid of it. And diaper. Damn you have good ideas sometimes, even if you do have to produce them through a shitty baby brain.

It is when your smug shitting draws to a close that you realise that you still lack operational capacity in several key areas. Namely, wiping your ass. Ugh. You ignore Bro and float over to the sink, and successfully twist the tap until there is a stream of water to wash your ass with. Hell yes your hands are capable of some things.

After a few seconds though, Bro snaps out of whatever he’d been doing and snatches you out of the sink, grabbing some wipes and doing the job properly. You acquiesce to this and feel a bit sulky, because you do not have the dexterity and flexibility to manage everything. Or the strength. How bullshit. You allow your gaze to wander as you are cleaned and notice that the inside of the shower cubicle seems sort of red. Huh.

==>

Later that day, Bro receives some phone calls that sound like they’re related to you. One from the police that seems to be something to do with missing persons reports, probably their efforts to find out whether or not anyone has reported you missing. One from someone claiming to be a doctor who Bro does not seem to enjoy speaking to; his responses get progressively more and more cold and curt before he just hangs up. He mutters “creepy motherfucker” afterwards, so you think it’s safe to assume that the guy was a dick. The same guy calls back once, and that ends pretty quickly, and on the third try his number is blocked. The last person who calls is probably a journalist, judging by the few replies Bro makes before he hangs up on that one, too.

You sleep for a bit, and when you wake up there’s another, thicker tether around your ankle, leading once more to Bro. You captchalogue the new tether, watching some shards of metal thunk into the futon, and move along, obstinately pawing at cupboards before you realise there is no way you can make baby formula and sullenly wait for Bro to realise what you’re doing. He makes the stuff for you, and you try to hold the bottle yourself and fail. It’s very embarrassing and makes a huge mess.

Bro cleans it up and washes you in the bathroom sink, and about ten minutes after you’re dried up, one load of the baby stuff arrives via delivery guy. This lot seems to have the furnishing stuff – there’s a basic crib, a basic changing table, and one of those baby pen cage things. You eye its box with concern while Bro assembles the crib. You remember what he said about putting a roof on it. You think your armoury of Sylladex crap could probably aggrieve a shitty roof pretty well, but you’re not sure. Bro’s creations can be pretty sturdy when he puts effort into them.

Considering your Bro is pretty fucking skilled when it comes to very complex tasks such as advanced robotics, it takes him pretty much no time at all to finish with the crib, furnish it with random sheets from around the house, and deposit you in it. He ties both of your feet to the crib bars and goes off to start putting the changing table together. You captchalogue both of your tethers into the mostly depleted sharp stack, and one of your previous tethers pops out. You watch Bro for a bit. It’s boring. You glance around and double-take, spotting a small Dave baby floating discreetly around the corner. He has blood in his hair, and a nasty looking wound in his side. He spots you, raises a chubby hand to his mouth, and makes a shushing motion. Then he floats back around the corner. You watch him go, more surprised than you usually are to see a future self. Mostly because of his appearance. You haven’t really seen yourself properly yet, after all, and babies look weird. Also the lack of glasses disturbs you, and the baby-wings are fucking bizarre. Also the wings are bloody. You uneasily wonder what shit is going to go down for you to get all bloody. You consider floating out of the crib to investigate, but shrug and go to sleep instead, because why not.

When you wake up, about an hour and a half later, your little hands are tied together and your feet are tethered to the crib bars. You discover that tied hands make it actually really difficult to access your Sylladex to captchalogue anything. This bothers you, as you realise that Bro has one-upped you. Or at least broken even.

You glance around and notice that Bro is nowhere in sight, but the fully constructed changing table is. The pen is nowhere to be seen, and this bothers you a bit, especially because when you concentrate you can hear power tools off in Bro’s workshop.

You concentrate on the conundrum of your bindings. You think that restraining a young child in this manner is not a good indicator of parenting skills, and also probably an invitation to sudden infant death syndrome, but you have to concede that you haven’t left Bro a lot of choice if he wants to prevent you from wandering off. A bit of glancing around also reveals a remote view webcam primed on your position. Damn. Well that raises the stakes – not only has Bro foiled you, but he can see it.

With absolutely no success, you try to open your Sylladex. Your little hands just flap about ineffectually in their restraints. You roll around in pure frustration for a while but then stop, because ow, wings. And shit, you slept on your wings, didn’t you, sweet jesus the cramps.

You roll to your side and wince as you flex out the limbs, experiencing some fucking terrible pins and needles in the process. Then you sort of wrap them forwards around your shoulders because that way you won’t be laying on them as much. Having extra limbs which don’t do anything useful is kind of annoying. Even if they get bigger and feathery and shit it’s not like you need them to fly, so they’re pretty much useless. You would much prefer a second pair of arms, even if it did make you look like a Pokémon. More hands would be pretty useful round about now. Even, dare you say it, handy.

….fucking god, John’s terrible puns have infected you. It’s all his fault.

You flex the wingtips irritably around your shoulders. More hands, more hands, your fucking kingdom for more hands. The wings do have a sort of bony sort-of-hand thing at the end of their sort-of-wrists, but it’s basically, like, a finger. A fuzzy finger.

…aand that might actually fucking work, holy shit.

You gesture with the wing-finger thing at the end of your right wing in the appropriate manner, and fuck yes, Sylladex! Except it comes up at a weird angle, sort of high up, because that’s where the wing-finger had gestured, and you can’t actually see the windows that well, dammit. You attempt to captchalogue your hand restraints, but you end up captchaloguing the foot restraints instead, and because you forgot you still had one sharp thing in the sharp thing stack (you idiot) the pointy end of half a katana flies upwards into the air, and the jagged broken-off part stabs lightly into the ceiling. Too lightly.

You watch the length of sharp, crappy metal quiver and slip in the plaster. You are staring a sword-point straight on. You are staring a sword-point straight on as it slips out of the ceiling and falls straight and true towards your face. You get your shit together and roll out of the way but what that ends up doing is exposing your squishy side and yeah, the point of the sword stabs into your side, brushing apart your crappy ribs and impaling both lungs probably but you don’t think it got your heart but that means nothing for how fatal this shit is.

The pain is immense and your infant brain doesn’t quite know what to do with it and you sort of panic and reach for time and-

==>

You are in the past and it is 2:36am and you are floating in the air in the spot where the crib would be in the day to come and you are also dying. You gasp and splutter and float into the bathroom and over the top of the shower door into a space where you can bleed and not stain the floors. You always hated it when your doomed timeline selves bled all over the floors so you’ll make an effort to avoid doing it even though shit ow dying!

You gargle and splutter, your mouth tastes like blood, and you can’t breathe and through the pain you notice you’re starting to feel very light-headed and yeah, you’re totally dying, not getting out of this one, so you hope to god that your Sylladex mishap wasn’t stupid enough that your death counts as just. You’re not exactly unfamiliar with dying (suddenly, it occurs to you that you remember every single one of your doomed timeline deaths, what the fuck?) but it never stops sucking total balls.

==>

Life and consciousness return to you a while later, and you’re lying in a puddle of congealed blood in the shower. Due to the presence of a drain, it didn’t get too bad, but the water wasn’t on to wash it away, so yeah, gross. Your time sense says that it’s still night and you’ve been out for maybe an hour. Your hands are still bound and there is still half a katana through your side. Seems your body healed around it? Hella inconvenient.

You saw your hand restraints open on the katana poking out at your side, which jolts the damn thing in your lungs and shit, you think you’re bleeding internally again. You try to captchalogue it but it doesn’t work, potentially because it’s embedded in your body, potentially because you healed around it, fuck if you know. You wince and work quickly, trying with your pathetic little handling appendages to pull the shard out. You slice your hands open and make barely any progress at all, so you get your shit together and prepare yourself to do something immensely painful. You float and rotate in the air, then press yourself down to the shower floor onto the protruding edge of the katana, slowly forcing it out, until the end of that side is inside your flesh and that method doesn’t work anymore. You return to pulling it out on the other side but you don’t get very far before your vision swims and you lose consciousness again.

==>

Seventy-three minutes after your second death today, you wake up again and you are even more sticky with blood than before. You return to the half katana in your side grimly, and you die once more before you manage to pry the thing out. Once you’ve managed it, though, you consider intentionally dying just so the damage will be healed because what’s left is a pretty substantial stab wound for a baby. And potentially a broken rib, too. You decide against it, though, and float upwards with a grimace. Through painstaking effort you manage to turn the shower on, though only to a horrific icy trickle, and shiver like some sort of small pathetic animal, maybe a bunny, as some of the blood gets washed away. You do your best to get it off, and the icy trickle gets rid of a fair bit of the blood at the bottom too, but considering it has been congealing there for hours, a lot of it probably isn’t going anywhere.

You give up on your wing fluff and hair as a lost cause, suddenly remembering your future self’s state, and turn the water off. Mostly. You get it to the stage where it’s sort of trickling a tiny amount of water down the showerhead, but that’s good enough.

You float over the shower cubicle wall thing and out of the bathroom door, somewhat relieved that flying is a thing you can do, because it doesn’t jar your wound much. It fucking hurts though and is still bleeding sluggishly, but you’re not sure you can do much about that. You don’t know where Bro keeps his first aid kit in this universe, and you doubt you’d be able to put it to use anyway.

You settle on the floor in the lounge for a while, considering what to do as you ignore the fucking nasty pain in your side. After a bit, you shrug and head to Bro’s workshop to write on the walls in your blood, because why the fuck not. You consider what to write, and select some fairly well known quotes, firstly for the irony and secondly because you don’t want to actually make Bro think you’re a demon or whatever.

After some deliberation, you write HER SKELETON WILL LIE IN THE CHAMBER FOREVER on one wall, the letters smeared and shaky and clumsy as fuck, and ENEMIES OF THE HEIR, BEWARE on another. After a brief pause, you add OF BREATH in brackets below HEIR. You think that enemies of the Heir of Breath mostly have to fear the terror of confronting a really shitty disguise, or maybe a sudden incursion of smoke bombs, but it’s the thought that counts.

You think you can be excused for making a direct Harry Potter reference because you wrote it with your own blood to fuck with your Bro, and that’s sort of hilarious and also pretty fucked up, but it did stop you from dripping blood everywhere. You think the wound is scabbing over now because you had less drippy writing material towards the end. You float to the bathroom again and wash your hands under the shower trickle.

After that, you have no idea what the fuck you should be doing, so you find a hidden spot behind the futon to curl up and go to sleep. You wake up and force yourself back asleep several times, and then listen with interest as the sounds of Past You aggressing the door draw you from your slumber. You keep an ear out for the proceedings you remember, intermittently napping when you get bored, but head off when you think the delivery is imminent, you don’t want to risk being discovered as Bro works. You hang out in his workshop for a bit, admiring the writing on the wall, and wish you could see Bro’s face when he witnesses this fine shit. You keep an ear out for signs of Bro heading to his workshop, but you think it’ll be a while yet, so you snag some of his graph paper and extract some chalk from your Sylladex (after sensibly switching to an array modus) to scrawl with. It’s the stuff you used to keep on hand for the Mayor. Man, you miss the Mayor. The Mayor was the shit. Is he even alive anymore?

Feeling a bit saddened by the thought, you draw a really shitty and barely identifiable Can Town in his memory.

Feeling slightly sombre after that, you float out of the workshop and down the hall, noticing the attention of your past self as you turn the corner. You raise your fingers in a shushing motion at him, then float around and head for the bathroom. You take a crap and clean up after yourself better than you did on your first attempt, but also kind of worse, because you have a wound in your side and you think you just re-opened it, shit, fuck, ow. You’re not sure what to do now, except oh wait, sounds like Bro is heading for his workshop now. You wish you could see his face when he sees the writing on the walls, but recently opened wound, ow fuck.

Grimacing, you float back towards the lounge, feeling exceptionally hungry but also very aware that you can’t expose yourself to Bro yet. You return to the nice secluded space behind the futon and sleep for a bit, wakening when you hear the sound of metal whooshing through the air. Poking your head over the back of the futon, you grimace as you watch your past self get impaled. Fuck, that’s embarrassing. Lamest deaths ever.

Once he disappears back in time, you float over and captchalogue the bloody sheets to hide the evidence, though you can’t do much about the hole in the ceiling, or the blood on you or the wound in your side. You sit yourself innocently in the crib just in time for Bro to flash-step his way to you, looking rattled as all hell. He stares at you like he has no idea what the fuck is going on, and picks you up all careful-like, finding the stab wound in your side swiftly.

“Fucking hell, little man.” He says, his voice a little rough. “What the fuck have you gone and done to yourself?” Shit, is he actually worried?

He takes you with him to collect the first aid kit, apparently from his bedroom closet, and then puts you on the changing table to do his thing. He extracts gloves and anti-bacterial wipes, and puts them to good use. It stings like hell. After a bit, he warns you “this is gonna hurt, sorry.” And then he puts a needle and thread to good use. You wince through the whole procedure, but frankly it’s not nearly as bad as prying half a katana out of your lungs, so you avoid squirming too much. Once he’s done he slaps some gauze on and sits you up. “That feel alright?” he asks you.

You inspect the stitched and wrapped wound on your side. Looks pretty fucking professional, actually. A childhood of being stitched up by Bro means that this surprises you very little, but you had to stitch enough of your own wounds after entering the game to appreciate his handiwork. You turn back to him and shrug.

He sighs, and nods. Then he straightens up and shit, that’s a pretty serious expression there. He picks you up and heads to his room, and sits you straight in his lap as he accesses his camera files on the computer. Whoops, you forgot about the webcam.

You wince a bit as you watch yourself get impaled on camera, a pretty obviously fatal wound, and then disappear. You then watch yourself float into the crib left absent by past camera self and settle there in time for Bro to arrive. Bro switches to a different video, footage taken of you writing the blood on his workshop walls. Yeah, shit, you should have realised he’d have a camera in there, there’s valuable shit in that place. “This makes more sense now. Sort of.” He says, then looks down at you. You glance up at him. He picks you up and sits you on the edge of his bed, swivelling the desk chair around so that he is facing you sternly. You feel sort of nervous at this, because that’s a preparing to chew out a bitch face if you ever saw one.

You think that he’s going to have some sort of big talk out or something, maybe demand answers about your god tier baby bullshit, but in the end it seems like Bro is pretty good at avoiding talking about shit that bothers him, so he just says “I’ll give you a little bell, or something. If you need to take a shit or get food or whatever, ring it and I’ll let you out, but you ain’t gonna be roaming around unattended on my watch, so stop fucking trying.”

You feel at once outraged at his bullshit and bizarrely touched by his concern. Only the former is safe to act on so you glower at him a bit, but then you remember that you’re hungry, so you point to your open maw.

“Yeah, sure,” He agrees, and hoists you off to the kitchen to feed you.