#sherlockbound

*

 Dave has always made claims to multiplicity of self, starting way back at twelve when his Emo Phase was kicking in and he made blog titles like “Welcome To My Twisted Mind” unironically. (The Emo Phase lasted all of four months, suffering a swift and brutal death via Bro and Dirk.) By thirty-two he’s grown practiced at ignoring the jolt every time he holds Terezi’s hand, like there are hundreds of him that have held her hand like this before, thousands that didn’t, billions and billions of Daves all experiencing and not experiencing this one moment. He feels the weight of them during odd moments—strolling a movie set, or hefting a longsword, or tapping the camera app on his phone. Moments and moments and moments ticking along where he does the action millions of times, and doesn’t do it millions more. Time is dead Daves, he thinks sometimes, and doesn’t laugh.

 *

 Rose learned long ago there are some questions that aren’t meant to be answered, but it took her far longer to learn there are some that aren’t meant to be asked. She communes with eldritch beings who call themselves “horrorterrors” (what an absurd word), who tell her things that make her wonder sometimes. She once asked them why she knew them by name before she’d ever met them, ever cracked open a book, and blacked out for hours. She awoke feeling refreshed and assumed she slipped into a nap while meditating. (She assumes. She does not swallow it as truth.) She traces the skin of her wife’s shoulder in the mornings, imagining that it luminesces independent of the sun’s glow. She other times imagines driving her knitting needles into monster eyes, imagines a trident puncture in her gut that feels terrifyingly real until she shifts and returns to her body. She looks at cue balls sometimes like they hold answers, and sometimes she can’t stand to wear black, because it could swallow her. Sometimes.

 *

 Jade’s fascination with the stars waxes and wanes, but her dedication to pushing the limits of reality has never faltered. Her hunger for knowledge is only sated when she makes some life-changing discovery or another (today’s is isolating the gene that carries certain cancers). She sits back, satisfied. She lets herself be complacent. Then once the paperwork is submitted and her discovery recorded for posterity, she moves on. There’s always something just out of her reach, she feels, staring at the stars. There’s something there. There is. Some greater truth tying all of it together, a thread binding up the universe. Universes. Space and matter and all that therein lies, she thinks as she draws her hand across the sky like she can feel the fabric of reality. She could expose the inner workings if she just tried hard enough. But there are some things she can’t do, no matter how hard she tries. She can’t overcome the voice in her head that whispers don’t. Not can’t, not shouldn’t, but don’t. There’s fear in the word, but not the kind that fuels her. Not the kind that she disregards.

 *

 Karkat dreams, like his hatchmate dreams, like his ancestor dreamed. He doesn’t remember the dreams, but now and then there’s something in his veins that pulses, something other than blood and fury. He never thinks to keep a dream journal, not like Kankri, because he read Kankri’s dream journal and it terrified him. Terrifies him still. There should be nothing of consequence about a gray planet with two moons. It’s the most absurd of dreamscapes, he thinks, like worlds made of lava and skyscrapers, of blood and mountains. Weird brain crap, he thinks, like winged dogs and universe frogs, like made-up words (god tier, echeladder, sylladex, fraymotif). Stupid. Just the babblings of the unconscious. Just that. It’s just dreams. He’s never met the people he holds dearest more than once, more than just the first time. There are no other times. He doesn’t lock eyes with strangers and have the thought I’ve known you before. He doesn’t hold his partner as she snores and think this is centuries’ worth of familiar, I knew you before I met you. He doesn’t look back on childhood memories and think thank gog it worked out differently this time.  He doesn’t. He doesn’t. He doesn’t.

 *

 Sollux hears voices of the damned sometimes. He’s heard people alive and well next to him screaming in agony, and he’s heard the guttural death-rattles of most of his friends. Their voices were young, impossibly young, how long has it been since his voice cracked like that or hers was so high? He sleeps in high-grade sopor most nights and he takes migraine pills, and if it weren’t for the occasional true voice—were it not for the sound a person makes during a fatal car accident just moments before it happens, the last words she said to her son echoing in Sollux’s ears and confirmed for truth years later—he’d ignore it all. He’s heard so many deaths for Dave he has to limit his contact, because there’s only so many times you can hear someone choke on their own blood before it becomes morbid. He hears so many deaths that don’t happen, that could never have happened, they almost drown out the deaths that do.

 *

 There are invisible scars on her friends’ skin. Feferi can see them, sometimes through their clothing, a tracework of injuries and maimings that never happened. In direct sunlight she could swear the others must see them too—they must see the two stab wounds in Karkat’s chest and the three in his stomach, musn’t they, they have to see the jagged lines across Dirk’s throat and the looming open hole in Kanaya’s torso, the splash of burns on Aradia’s body and the bruises on Nepeta’s face and on and on and on. She once traced a finger along the line bisecting Eridan’s body just to see what happened, and he didn’t even react. She touches the ragged hole in her chest often, and feels something stinging slightly. She told Sollux about them once, just about her own. He went silent for hours and she never brought it up again. She’s learned to visually tune them out by now. She almost never sees a new one.

 *

 Calliope houses more pieces of herself and others than most people, but even with Scratch and memories of Caliborn and the fragmented, stitched-together thing that is her own soul, she doesn’t understand everything. She dabbles in time control and warps space regularly, but when a Very Insistent Voice tells her to stop, she stops. She never thinks (anymore) to ask the same questions Rose often does, that Jade does, that so many of her other friends skirt around without conscious knowledge of the fact. She keeps a firm, modest belief in an afterlife and a forelife, and lets that assuage her.

 Scratch howls sometimes, howls about holes in his own knowledge and about holes in his memories, and Calliope is practiced at shutting him down. But if his memory has holes, she can’t explain why there are extra bits stuffed into hers, why she dreams sometimes of a stage and a white wig and firefly wings. There are childhood doodles secreted in her home somewhere that she can’t look at now without feeling unsettled, doodles of figures that look strangely like friends she hadn’t met back then wearing fanciful hoods and pajamas. Caliborn destroyed most of her art portfolio, when they were a child, then would lay quietly in the wreckage and chew on his claws, his free hand curled around his ankle. It’s. Just us. Just you and me. Little sister, he would say to her, and then laugh. One day. It will be. Just me! And it was just him, for so long. It was just him, and just her, floating through life like it was a deserted world, he gaining strength, she hiding herself away. She asked him once, if he understood their shared dreams. He spat at the wall and tore her drawing of a girl with blue hair and a lollipop in half.

 It’s just us. Just you and me, he repeated savagely. Just you and me. All the rest. Is noise.