#jakepalooka

Instead of transportalizing to your respective new homes one by one, you and Roxy are both standing on the transportalizing pad, arms slung around each other to make both of you fit. Each of you holds one of the Condesce’s sawed off horns in one hand, and has the other fisted in your tops. You can feel their breath brush past your neck. It tickles, and you smile.

“You did so well,” you murmur. “I’m so proud of you.”

“I’m proud of you,” Roxy says, and you both hug each other just a little tighter. “Let’s go.”

One zap later, you are out of the alien spaceship, out of the barren wasteland of your dead game session, and in Barcelona. Roxy’s pad is in the middle of their living room, in a sweet little apartment in the city. Among the people. Looking around you can tell that they’re having some trouble keeping things tidy, but are doing their best, and you’re proud of them all over again.

“Jake’s gonna be so jealous,” Roxy says, turning their troll horn between their hands, running their thumbs over the rough surface of it.

You manage a smile, but say nothing. You haven’t been thinking about your timeline’s Jake much. Roxy told you that he’s been dating Jane, which can’t be good. Roxy, at least, is incredibly annoyed with this outcome, but still friends with both of them. You’ve talked to Jane twice in the past year, always briefly and politely, and haven’t spoken to Jake since he ghosted you. You’re pretty sure he still thinks you’re evil, because that’s what Dirk told him years ago, and then you killed Dirk and haven’t exactly made any big efforts in disproving his claims to Jake. Going off to kill an alien empress, you figure, probably didn’t help your case.

Roxy looks at you, takes in your smile, and smiles back just as sheepishly. “Maybe one day you two’ll come around,” they say.

You shrug. You have better things to do for now, you think, but you also think that you’re immortal and just finished doing the one big thing that was holding you back in pursuing the life you want. You say, “Maybe one day.”

Nodding, Roxy starts looking around their own apartment, seeming just a little bit lost. You’re looking forward to coming home to your boat, your pets, your bots, meeting up with Alma and Palooka. You… You hope Roxy will be okay. You hope they have someone to meet up with, as well. They turn towards you, a realized Rogue in a teenage apartment, and you can’t quite remember why you and them barely talked to each other for five years.

“Wanna hang out next weekend?” they say. You smile.

“Yeah,” you say. “I’ll come over. I love Barcelona.”

“Cool,” Roxy says. “Alright. I won’t keep you. Send me a pic of Turing when you’re home, yeah?”

“Sure,” you say. Roxy and you used to have a pretty good Snap streak going. Maybe you’ll get back into it. You step on the pad, and then wave at them with the hand holding the troll horn, which makes them laugh, and you feel warm and secure inside, and know that this was all worth it. “Bye, Rox.”

Roxy waves their horn back at you. “See ya, Al.”

Your feet hit the deck of the Discovery One, and you immediately close your eyes and take a deep breath of ocean air. Then you exhale, and take the next one. Oh, you missed being out here so much--

Turing screams.

You open your eyes again to see your little black cat barrel towards you, and you laugh and crouch down and open your arms for him. He rams his head into your free hand, immediately demanding pets, and keeps meowing loudly. Squarewave announces himself with a loud, “YOOO PIZZA HUT!” and joins Turing, with Sawtooth in pursuit, and you’re home.

Your betta and cherry barbs start zooming around their tank wildly once they see you approach. All your plants look good and healthy. Turing won’t stop yelling for attention. This is where you belong, you’ve been feeling like that for months already, but now, with this out of the way, you feel like you’re allowed to stay, too.

Alma comes over shortly after you’ve settled back in, and you receive another bone-crushing hug. You thank him for checking in on your pets and plants while you were away, and for everything else, and hold on to him for a while.

Exhaustion catches up with you soon, and you plug yourself in to charge and curl up in bed. You promised Palooka you’d stop by, and you will once it’s not night for him anymore. You’ll just rest until then. Turing is snuggled up close to you, and you try your best to fall asleep.

Hours later, you’re still lying awake, scrolling through old posts about and conversations with Jake instead. This does not feel like the best course of action to you, but you feel his absence in your celebrations like a hole in the stomach, and you don’t remember when you last missed someone so much.

Palooka seemed so optimistic about the two of you. You already know that just going to his house later will set you on a clear path of getting your boyfriend back.

Goddamn Hope players, you think.

You get up again in the morning, fully charged but not well rested, knowing that you’ll be relaxing just fine at Palooka’s. He let you choose something for him to cook upon your return, so you’re going to be having chili. You’re going to hold his puppy and pet his pig, crash on his couch and recover from what you put yourself through for the past few weeks. And then maybe, sometime this week, you will find Jake in LA.

You’re going to be alright. It is amazing to be back home.

Of all the hugs you’ve recently received, Palooka’s are by far the best ones. He’s huge and warm and calls you Pizza Hut, and you know you joke about him and Alma being your moms. But in this instant, you are with your family.

Something is wrong with your output. When you go through your logs, they tell you that you must have been talking, even though you don't remember saying anything. When you check your blog, there are several posts you don't recall putting there. You hurry to check your messages, but it doesn't seem to have gone that far -- thankfully, you haven’t told any of your friends to obey, submit, or consume lately.

Yesterday's craving for cookies makes more sense now, you think. It's also fantastically ridiculous.

It doesn't worry you much. You can get her propaganda out of your system, you've done it before. It doesn't worry you much, until you try to move away from the sparring bot, and your body does something entirely else instead.

In stunned silence, you watch your first surge forward and, with force you knew you had in you but never actually used, punch right into the metal head. You watch the material give, dent, then break, watch the edges cut into your hand, wrist, then arm. Your shark skin is so tough that in the year of you having it, nothing has actually broken through it before, but this will do it.

You have pain receptors, carefully crafted long ago, but you don’t feel anything, right now. You feel like you are glasses again, perched on somebody else’s nose, watching idly whatever the hell this guy is doing with his body. None of it seems like a very good idea, to you, but it doesn’t feel like your call to make. Your hand takes a shard of metal from the sparring bot’s face, and then your body pushes itself upright. You look down as you get a better grip on the shard, aim, and plunge it right into your own stomach.

Hm.

Well.

That doesn’t really do much of anything to you. You still don’t feel any pain, and when you pull the piece of metal back out of yourself, you can see something thick and brown ooze out of the wound.

It’s chocolate milk.

You must have hit your synthetic stomach that also doesn’t actually do much, digestion-wise. It just sort of keeps the food there for a bit until you go to the bathroom. This will be a bitch to fix, but it’s nothing you’re not prepared for.

The thought pulls you back, pulls your mind in between your shoulders, pushes your thoughts through the wires inside your arms. Yeah, right, you were prepared for this. It’s not part of Plan A. You didn’t want this to happen, but you suspected it might. Your emergency protocol in case of corruption was to put up a bunch of fake information about yourself she could find, like that your vital hardware is located in your stomach. It’s not. That would be stupid. It’s sprinkled all over your body in multiple hard to reach places, like the important piece of storage that’s lodged deep in your right thigh. She doesn’t seem to know that, which means she can’t have gotten very far yet.

You can get her back out.

Unfortunately, realizing what’s happening and pulling your consciousness back into your body has reminded you that you can, in fact, feel pain.

Crying out, you crumple to the floor, your good hand clutching your bad hand clutching your stomach. For several seconds, you don’t know where to start -- you can turn off the pain, but you should amp up your security software first, you need to get her out but you can’t do that if your mind is clouded with the pain of a stab wound to the guts and your hand falling apart but if you waste too much time getting the pain under control she might advance further into your data and you can’t have her finding out where your real vital hardware lies ---

Your scream rips through the undergrowth, loud enough to make a flock of birds flee from a nearby tree, to make you feel the vibrations of your own voice hum through the roof of your mouth. That helped. Kicking her out is a matter of a few, practiced steps. You can take care of the pain later; you’ve felt worse before.

So you stay where you are, curled up into a little ball, eyes screwed shut, teeth clenched, fingers twisting into each other, enduring. You’ve stopped crying out -- you’ve stopped making any noise at all, only focusing on your very inside, on what keeps you running, what makes you you. This by far isn’t her first attempt at corrupting you or your brothers, and over the years you’ve learned to adapt, keep updating your anti-virus, keep finding new measures that keep up with whatever she has been up to. You assume that this time she got in because you must have left some sort of trace on the drone you and Roxy sent her, which of course isn’t ideal. It means, however, that you opened the door for her, and you damn well know how to close it again.

She doesn’t put up much of a fight. You assume that she got what she came here for -- your vital organs and your immediate future plans. If you put up enough of a struggle, you figure, she will believe in that success.

The second you reach 0% corruption, you slump forward, face first into the dirt. It muffles your pained groan for the few beats you spend like this, before your feet start shifting against the ground in an attempt to somehow deal with the feeling of having a hole in your stomach. The way through your programming to turn off pain, at least, is a quick one now.

You flip the switch, and stop feeling anything. The moan you let out doesn’t vibrate through your mouth, but at least you hear it. You almost laugh at yourself. You don’t quite feel like it, though.

Walking the Earth with your touch receptors turned off is always weird, but it helps you get things done quickly. You check in on your brothers first, to make sure neither of them got caught in any sort of crossfire. They are fine, your plants are fine, your cat and your fish are fine. You want to pat yourself on the back for acting quickly enough, but once you chuck the broken sparring bot into your workroom and then sit down there to fix yourself, that sentiment leaves you pretty quickly.

You fix your stomach, then glue the cuts in your skin shut again, both your stomach and your hand. It looks like you have scars now, for the first time in your artificial life. In the back of the room, you have way more skin left over, rolled up like fabric, but you’d have to sew a whole new suit from it if you wanted to keep a body without scars. You don’t have time for that right now. You have to-- you want to act fast.

You have just about fucking had it.

Once you’re all glued up, you turn your receptors back on, then leave the workroom to say goodbye to the bots, your pets, and all of your plants. You check your sylladex to make sure that you have what you need on you -- a copy of SBURB, Dirk’s hand grenade. You step out on the deck, unnecessarily roll your shoulders, and message Roxy.

They reply immediately.

TT: She took the bait. See you in Rainbow Falls in five. TG: EFFIN finally TG: make it 3

Three it is. You nod to yourself, and open every other conversation that currently matters to you. To Alma, you say,

TT: Hey, I gotta bounce. There’s a note on the fridge about pet and plant care. TT: Thanks. TT: You know, for all of it. TT: Catch you on the flipside.

Messaging Palooka makes you a bit more nervous, but you don’t want to leave without another word.

TT: I’m off now. TT: Still reachable, but I’m on my way. TT: Just wanted to let you know. TT: I’ll stop by when I’m back.

You open your conversation with your… your ex-boyfriend, you suppose, too. You haven’t talked, since you told him what you’re doing. Something in you wants to let him know, but you don’t quite see the point in telling him that you’re actually leaving now. You wouldn’t know what to say, anyway. And if you stare at this any longer, your three minutes will be up.

sometimes to get to god, first you gotta meet the devil.

Your name used to be Dirk Strider. When you were a child, you were the loneliest person in the universe, and all you wanted to do was matter. Then one day, when you were thirteen, you woke up and were not Dirk Strider anymore. You had been demoted to a knock-off, a less important version of yourself that couldn’t physically do anything, that nobody cared about. You had to sit back and watch other people be relevant, watch other people do things and take control of their lives, while you were struggling with the mere concept of being a living person.

Jake doesn’t understand your constant urge to mean something. You didn’t expect him to; he’s been through this, he’s played his own session of the Game, he doesn’t want to hear anything about it anymore. You get it. It’s fine. He doesn’t have to understand that you need this, that you’ve been craving this since the second you were transferred into a pair of sunglasses, and that it’s the one, the final thing you have to do, to prove to yourself that you are a person.

You are real and you exist in this world, and you are going to leave a dent in it.

You sit on the roof of Roxy’s house while they set up the computers for your two-player session, and you send out pings into the universe. She will come here. You know she will. She found your fake body blueprints, and she found your fake future plans that showed you stopping her whole operation from Earth. She has enough incentive to get her shitty red spaceship back here, but no idea what actually awaits her. No idea that you and Roxy are ready to fuck this entire timeline just to get back at her.

You sit on the roof of Roxy’s house, and you wait for Her Imperial Condescension to come to you, so you can kill her. She will do what you want her to. People always do, sooner or later. You will get her where you want her, then you will induce the apocalypse, and kill the tyrant that has tormented you over the course of your entire existence.

And then, you think, with all of that out of the way, with your home timeline reduced to dust and your nemesis caught in the ensuing detonation of all you knew growing up, you will finally be ready, to go. To move on.

This is your moment in the spotlight. None of this is necessary for anyone else, except for maybe Roxy -- this planet is dead. Sitting on the roof, you overview the remnants of a society that has long since been eradicated. You are doing this for yourself. You are making yourself relevant, to only yourself.

It’s your gift, to you.

Dirk really does look ridiculous in your winter gear. It’s too big on him -- not dramatically, but just enough to be noticeable, especially the dark red padded jacket. He’s quiet, but so are you, watching the sun go down behind the mountains. It’s painting the snow a soft orange, making it look warmer than it actually is. There are no tracks here, no skiers, just you and him and the trees.

You were hesitant about it, bringing him here. It’s pretty, and new to him, and you didn’t want to rub it in. You didn’t want to rub in what you have more than your general living situation already did on its own. Dirk has been missing out on some really good stuff, and he will go back to missing out on it soon, and you didn’t want to make it even harder on him.

But you asked, carefully, if he wanted to go out with you, and he said yes. It’s been quiet, between you, ever since yesterday. A good kind of quiet, where there is a mutual sort of understanding between you, knowing that neither of you wants conflict. You’ve talked about some important things in the past days, and you’re glad it’s out, but the prospect of him disappearing soon has you mulling things over again. You don’t feel quite as tired as you have been -- all of this is still incredibly exhausting, but now that it’s ending soon and you actually have an outlook towards a nice, calm, and Dirk-less New Year’s eve, you at least feel like you’re functioning again.

“The air out here is real nice,” Dirk says. You nod.

“I know.”

“What do you mean you know?” Dirk’s scoff sounds amused, and that’s a vast improvement. “You don’t breathe.”

“I can still sense what the air is like, you shithead,” you say, perfectly calm. Yeah. This is working out nice.

“Fine,” Dirk says.

You look up at the orange sky and say, “I’m sorry.”

“Huh?”

“I used to apologize a lot, for everything,” you tell the sky. “I spent the past year trying to work through that. Only apologize for things that are actually my fault, only feel bad for things I actually had control over. So I’m not sorry for defending myself when my life was on the line. I’m not sorry for what I did.”

Dirk lowers his head, then raises it again, a slow nod, a Go on.

“But I do feel sorry for what went down,” you say. “The whole of it. I’m sorry you died. I didn’t mean for that to happen. I already told you that, but I mean it. It was an accident, and I’m sorry it happened. If I could have just knocked you out, I would have done that. If I could have stopped Crocker’s attack in time, I would have done that. But I couldn’t, and I’m sorry for that.”

“You did what you had t--” Dirk starts saying, and it puts a rush of something good through you, but you don’t let him finish.

You say, “I’m not done. I’m sorry you died. We were kids, and you went way too early. I’m sorry you never got to leave the stupid old apartment, not in the way you wanted, and I’m sorry you never got to meet Dave and Rose. I’m sorry dream bubbles suck. None of this is my fault, but I need you to know that I’m still sorry. In the-- in the way that people say they’re sorry for your loss. I’m sorry for everything that was taken from you, because you didn’t deserve that. You should have had it so much better, and I’m sorry that I did, and you didn’t.”

The air is cool on your skin. You gave Dirk your snow pants, so your jeans are cold and soaking now, but it’s fine. It’s good. You can feel your own body, and you need that.

Dirk stays quiet for several seconds, like he’s waiting for you to say something else, like you did just now. You don’t. Your steps crunch in the snow, and you listen to Dirk breathe in and out deeply.

“You were right,” he says. You have half a mind to throw him a comically shocked look, but maybe it’s not the time for theatrics. “About what you said, the day before yesterday, in your living room. I would have done the same in your situation, and we know, because you’re me. You were right about that. I can’t…” When you look at him, he squints his eyes against the sun, face twisting like he has to force the words out of himself. You relate. It’s alright. “I can’t hold this against you. I tried to. I wanted to. Fuck, Alan, I fucking died, and I just want someone to blame. But it’s not you.”

He ducks his head down, to study the snow. You look away again, and watch a bird flutter out of a tree nearby.

“All we ever did in that apartment,” Dirk says, “was try to survive. You did that. I would’ve done the same thing. It’s okay.”

You have no lungs, so you don’t breathe, but you feel like exhaling, so you pull some air in through your nose and push it back out through your mouth. “Air’s good,” you say quietly. Dirk snorts.

He says, “I’m gonna go ahead and blame Fishsticks instead, if that’s alright with you.”

“Oh, yeah,” you say. “You can blame her. Blame her real hard. Knock yourself out, chief.”

“Sucks that Dave just gave up,” Dirk says. His voice is mostly level, but you’ve been him long enough to detect the slight waver. “I mean I get being depressed out of your mind, but man, giving her hell is kinda important, isn’t it? And now nobody’s doing that anymore. She’s just out there.”

You can feel him look at you, and you understand what he’s saying immediately. You don’t return the gaze. You look at the sky and think about how worried some people in your life got when you only did the bare minimum to help someone in another timeline piss off their Condesce. Then you think about how you went and did it anyway, and how right it felt.

“Yeah,” you say, dragging out the syllable. “Guess somebody should do somethin’ about that.”

“RoLal would probably be on board,” Dirk says. You smile, and say nothing. Maybe he talked to her about it, but you still don’t exactly want to know. It’s been a tough pill to swallow, the way he went and reconnected with his friends, the way the rapbots jammed with him. You don’t want to imagine the sort of conversation he and Roxy had, when everytime you and her talk it still feels sad and stiff from beginning to end. You don’t want to put yourself through this right now. You already know it’ll haunt you enough in the coming days.

Next to you, Dirk pulls his phone out of his pocket (ghost phone, you think) and checks the display before pushing it back in.

“‘s almost time,” he says.

You hum. In a way, you’re glad that he’s just going to stop existing with no warning. That means you won’t do any awkward goodbye hugs and waving and walking away. You’re bad at saying goodbye to people. You’ve learned that about yourself.

Still stomping through the snow, you pass the tree you saw the bird fly out of earlier. You reach into an inside pocket of your jacket, and pull out a pair of Kamina shades. Just last month, you threw a pair of those into the ocean for him, saying that they’ll find him. This is a little less poetic, but you guess it still works.

“Here,” you say, and hold them out to him. “I have no idea if this is gonna work and they’ll go back into the afterlife with you, but I figured it’d be worth a shot.”

He looks at you, then at them, before taking them into his hands and immediately shoving them onto his face, like he was somehow starving for them. You do him the favor of not laughing at him, but you do smile a little when he makes a satisfied noise.

“They’re not computerized,” you say. “But you know how to do that yourself if you ever wanna.”

“Yeah,” Dirk says. He turns his head, and you look back at him this time. It’s easier, with the shades, even if a bit trippy, for you, who used to be them. Then again, you used to be him, too. “Thanks.”

“Sure,” you say.

You walk in silence for a few more steps. Then, with a strange pop, the air to your left fills up the hole Dirk leaves when he disappears. You continue walking.

You return to your boat twenty minutes later. You peel yourself out of your cold wet jeans, and hang them up to dry. You put on a new pair, and stand in front of your closet. You say, out loud, “Motherfucker stole my goddamn snow gear.”

It’s funny, so you try to laugh. You don’t. You go into the living room, and sit down on the floor. Turing pads out of the bedroom and bumps his head into your knee, and you reach out to pet him, but your chest makes a loud noise like a CD drive trying to play a BluRay, and he flinches back.

You drop your hand on your lap, and you close your eyes. The place is dead silent. One more time, the absence of Dirk in your household leaves a gap so glaring it seems almost palpable.

Your chest makes that noise again, and this time, it hurts. You open Discord, and message Alma. You text him, “He’s gone,” and then you add, “Please.”