Chapter Text
five:
You stare at him through the abstract distance you have constructed for yourself and wish the entire world would collide itself together just so you could feel his kiss on your skin.
It is undeniably freakish to watch him sleep in this way. He doesn’t even know you’re still here, having been dead to the world since 10:07PM last night, and awfully prone to the flight that he is you never did wake him when he took his kips for the night. Still a victim to habit, you keep your mind running but your body firmly still, and decide then and there that doing this is the worst possible choice you could’ve ever made for yourself. You’ve pooled everything you hold dear in for the jackpot, and though nothing in that criterion includse Jake English anymore, you cannot find it within yourself to break free. It’s a constant gnawing want, just barely bordering on dependency, and as you’re well aware addiction is a powerful thing.
Speaking of addiction, the amount of whisky bottles sitting on his nightstand concerns you, again. He concerns you, with his star-eyed brightness and warmth in his voice and patience when you are being difficult, the little way he sighed and shook when you tugged him closer last night instead of getting up and leaving like you always do. You once wondered how much you could push until he broke, and though he puts up a magnanimous display of never being able to break nowadays, there is still a line. There is always a line. You of all people know that, have known that. It’s simply that you are more willing to toy with that line nowadays than you did a year ago, three years ago, five years ago, when you were sixteen and alive and watching Jake awkwardly descend down the mountain with your decapitated head tucked under his arm like a football.
This is not saying much, since your aversion to anything motivated by caprice or ennui or whatever the poets called it is one of the traits you carried throughout most of your life, and one you recently found yourself ridding of whenever you could manage to. It’s still a testament when, as you slowly make peace with the fact you are seized with the urge to hold him, that you wiggle out of his iron grasp to at the least offer a mutual one-sided-conscious embrace rather than having him spoon you all the damn time. Physical contact continues to be the easiest step in a long list of amendments the two of you made, stemming way back from the first time you repaired a shot-dead relationship; some things never change. Though you do question, more often than you are explicitly comfortable with, how much of it is Jake and how much of it is Lord English speaking when he now flashes you unfamiliar trademark grins, takes your kicks and punches in complete stride, offers only a wink and a gunshot in response to your verbal abuse poised to kill. It seems he is capable of handling anything you throw out at him, that he has three contingency plans in response to every action of yours, and for that reason you know it to be a facade.
It’s a confidence you would have once killed anyone, including him and yourself, to see. In some sense you have done exactly that, taken and burned every bridge in the book, pushed your fingers into Jake’s mind and rattled around the circuitry there until it went red-green-blue at the exact timings you wanted it to, all so that he could play the smooth womanizing casanova that he’s always fancied himself as. You cannot tell for the life of you why that persona manifesting into existence unsettles you to your core, why your heart threatens to dissipate when you bite back at him and he responds with an open display of hurt, when the only pain you are ever permitted to see of him ever again is a physical one. You never thought you would miss Jake English’s brand of neuroticism, but as already established, addiction is a powerful thing.
This thing that the two of you continue to do, this strange dance single-handedly maintained (or you like to think) by Jake’s relentless conviction that he can somehow cure you, fix you, Hope you into a semblance of normalcy, it maims you. It is surprising nowadays when Rose fixes you with a knowing smile in a later-than-usual morning breakfast halfway through her "tea," and even Dave’s undeniable future catch-up to your ship and your eventual death at his hands feels ambiguous. Ambiguity has never served you well in any area, but especially not with Jake English, which is why you allow yourself to orbit around him pathetically despite it all, waiting for him to deal a finishing blow one way or the other.
You also wonder, frequently, how your Jake is doing.
It’s a preposterous sentiment. This Jake in your arms, the Jake, is your Jake as much as any—he’s gone Ultimate, that’s the point, that every Dirk Strider wedged in the fragments and cracks of your soul has a matching Jake English in his to complement you out. But even still you know that this is not the Jake from your original timeline, the one who collapsed on his hands and knees to beg you for a privilege you refused to allow him, the one who swore he loved you and that he was sorry, sorry. You wonder, if you were to leave this one the way you left your Jake, if he would ever deign himself to begging. That’s a stupid question: of course he would.
Once again, this is likely your fault. You are the one who pushed him to be collected and open, to be genuine and complete, to determine things with all the succinctness of a falling blade and stick with it, Jesus Christ. It makes narrative sense, falls perfectly in with your leitmotif of regret and second chances and wrong decisions made at the right times, that after he’s gone and killed himself for the sake of manifesting your wishes you are scared of it.
But it does scare you, and in the early morning of his embrace it’s incredibly easy to observe the way you have not once seen anything close to genuine on his face. Even his hesitations are laced with calculation, as if he was always meant to hesitate at that exact moment—if you concentrate, maybe you can see the italicized stage directions that prompt him to look away, heave a sigh, whisper regret-curated confessions to your half-asleep form that always feel more like testaments to his character than to him. It is also a tragedy that he’s chosen opaque glasses as part of his costume. You so rarely see his eyes anymore, and they had always been the most honest part about his expressions, much like yourself.
In your most asinine of years, so practically your entire life, the appeal of Jake English had been the fact that he is not a God. The fact that he wasn’t God, but he could save you, if you were good enough to show him just that—the addictive flavour that kept you hooked line and sinker to his blubbering tears and alcohol-laced breath and idiocy was that if a being this imperfect could possess so much potential, surely you would not be his one contrarian example to the idea that belief made something real, something good. You find that now, at this moment, no matter how desperately you want his faux-aggrandized persona to be the final dose you’ll ever need, that you simply cannot trust something that has so little evidence behind it. Not when his eyes flutter open and find yours staring directly at his, and in a step quicker than your flashes you can see something dangerously close to mourning anchor away into the depths of his soul and bury there, the way something almost threatens to re-surface at his passive understanding that you have just witnessed something you were not given a pass to see. And as he stares unendingly to your eyes, as you blink three times as much as he does that short half-minute, your disposition as a Prince of Heart makes you uniquely qualified to permit the judgment that you might have just broken out a piece of Jake English’s heart and taken it for yourself.
Almost instinctively you tighten your grip, shudder in his hold and feel a part of you curse yourself as you lean inward, upward, waiting for him to pull away. He only smiles, and it’s a little pathetic and nihilistic and you find you can no longer put a label to the emotion on his face for the life of you, but it's just familiar enough that you follow through with your original plan and carefully, hesitantly press your lips to his forehead. He doesn’t react as you would, doesn’t so much as acknowledge the gesture with something as trivial as verbosity, but as you extend your kiss on his skin he allows his eyes to fall shut again. For a while there is silence, and with baited breath you expect him to pull away—God knows you’d never allow such long contact, not to mention something this fucking intimate. A finger on your back begins tapping, slowly, but only when his breathing eases down and his eyelashes flutter one last time do you realize he’s tapping to your heartbeat. The fact that his finger has stilled proves to be a blessing rather than a loss—he doesn’t show so much as a sign of awareness when your heat goes pitter, patter.
You think that maybe, just maybe, a version of you out there lost you the privilege of looking under Jake’s curtain when it killed itself without so much as a word to anyone. But you can still see the technicians dressed in all-black holding the outfits in the wings for a quick-change, and you can see a glimpse of Jake flitting around backstage until it’s time for him to be on once again; that is what you need, for now.
four:
After another three days and three breakfast-glares from Rose, you bring up the courage to go for a visit, making the grand total of time you were capable of spending without the company of Jake English about 244 hours. You gaslight yourself that a glorified intervention is really the perfect opportunity to assassinate him, or at least commit some form of espionage around the areas of the ships that you are not permitted to see.
You start out in his office.
If his planning goes anything like yours, he’d be practically glued to the location. Besides, it isn’t as if your evidence of this isn’t substantial—from the hours you’ve been locked in this exact location, watching that stupid fucking full-wall-ceiling-to-floor window display the stretch of space for hundreds of thousands of miles on end, you know that Jake practically lives here.
There is a small couch in the corner for sleep, there is a fridge and a cabinet he keeps his alcohol in, there are twelve different TV screens (all turned off—you can see your reflection glancing back at you as you count them out) of various shapes and sizes right alongside a white-board projector setup on one wall. His desk is still home to a ridiculous amount of DVDs and maps, but they’re neatly stacked by color order instead of being scattered all over the place: his office is empty, and what more, clean. As if someone had come in and artificially robbed it of everything that made it Jake’s. It unsettles you, then pisses you off for unsettling you. You don’t give a shit whether Jake is behaving one way or the other; if the guy’s so determined to claim that nothing is real and everything is your decision, so have it, you’ll extend that courtesy by refusing to acknowledge jack-shit as "out of character."
And yet you waste valuable time staring at the office. He’d never been the clean sort, this must be the work of Karkat, but considering that he’d also never been the type to sleep on his own fucking bed (futons, couches, armchairs, yours) the fact that the blankets on the little corner couch have dust over them is implicative as ever that he straight-up hasn’t been working.
Maybe he isn’t even here.
You aren’t sure whether that annoys or frightens you. For what reason? That Jake will commit suicide again, this time in your company, as if he could ever bring up the courage to want it again? As if he hasn’t sworn you up and down that his last time was the last time, like an alcoholic promising her blubbering family that this is it, I swear, I’m so sorry Dirk.
(But he’s hoped for it once, he can hope for it again. You of all people know how compelling the concept of Hope happens to be to people like you.)
You can’t sense Karkat or John anywhere near this room either, which is strange in its own right. They’re presumably out on some intergalactic hangout judging by the lack of a single two-person spaceship you saw when sneaking in through the garage; you’d never taken Egbert for the Vantas type, but whether Dave’s friends fraternize with each other in their free time or not is none of your business. You leave the office, your exit silent and brief thanks to the well-oiled hinges of the door and your feather-light steps, and take a moment to survey your surroundings.
You glance at the door with a comedically shiny golden star plaque, emulating every inch of that 90s dressing room in a nearly absurd way, neatly attached to the dead center of the entrance alongside a set of bells; you know what the room is, that much is obvious, but whether you will open it to find the same bedroom as you recall is another matter entirely, so you dismiss it.The other door has a weirdly earthy scent wafting from the gap underneath, and you are not looking to be lectured by Rose about getting a self-cleaning outfit “dirty.” The final and last option is to head into the larger living area, which you do with no hesitation.
You smell the answer before you see it. Each ingredient (cheese cream salt pepper egg—how the fuck did he even get an egg?) is clear as day to you, so much so that you need to forcibly shut down your wandering imagination as to Jake fixing them into a stupidly sentimental combination you have not been subjected to in years. Upon actually coming into view of the kitchen block and confirming your hypothesis, you feel relief like an idiot for ever thinking he’d be anywhere else.
Jake English is making pasta for dinner.
Still wearing the robes, obviously, because God fucking forbid he stop being an ostentatious show-off at any given moment, but you think you can see a complete lack of suit peeking out from under his clothes. He’s humming a tune under his breath as an old-fashioned phonograph blasts some 1980s number from a record, looking incredibly relaxed even as he must have sensed your presence—there’s no way he hasn’t. Predictably he gives a little spin around, wearing an embroidered Kiss The Chef apron with fucking lace frills at the end, with a pan full of what you confirm to be pasta inside. You consider knocking the pan out of his hand with your sword, but then he simply makes a clicking noise with his tongue and sets the thing back onto the stove.
JAKE: Just in time.
JAKE: Lets eat.
It’s an offer you have to bite your tongue to refuse, but he goes ahead and plates down two little bowls of Mac & Cheese anyway (under the robes, he’s wearing his outfit—a simple white shirt and cargo pants). The Kraft brand that you know makes him sick, unless going Ultimate has magically re-wired his gastrointestinal capability to process "cheese." He sticks a fork into both, sets them down at the table, and takes a seat while gesturing for you to do the same. Before you can decide whether to comply or not he picks up a ready-filled glass of whisky to knock a full swallow back, and as he basks in the ambient rose-gold lighting of the singular lamp he has on it clicks for you, swift and deadly.
DIRK: Are you sober?
JAKE: No.
JAKE: Are you upset?
Instead of responding you sit, pick up the fork, and take a bite from the Mac & Cheese. It’s predictably as good as Kraft gets, considering Jake being ossified has never prevented him from knowing his way around a kitchen. He grins at you like you’ve just gotten something right, so you offer him an unimpressed look in return, and he shrugs it off. In some ways it’s identical to the way he dismisses the cuts and burns you inflict onto him, but the way he doesn’t even touch his food as he sips away from that glass like it’s fucking water, you imagine it’s not exactly the same.
The sense of dread approaching you at 299,792,458 m/s doesn’t have shit on the way he’s looking at you, silently watching you eat while pouring enough alcohol into his system to kill a horse. Shit, maybe his gastrointestinal capability did get re-wired; the Jake you remember could barely finish two glasses at most. He’s humming some number under his breath—the copious amount of years you’ve spent in Roxy’s general vicinity compels you to recognize it as a Taylor Swift track—though it’s too distant for you to make out which song. His fingers idly drum against the table, lethargic and feather-light, like too harsh of a tap is going to shatter the ground below the two of you.
His song shifts to Riptide. You desperately ignore the implications. This silent, sickening domesticity of you playing dutiful baby bird to an alcoholic absentee father is undeniably a hundred times worse than any grandiose speech about fate he’s ever presented to you. The environment feels suffocating until he clears his throat, captchalogues the glass directly into his ‘dex, and takes a bite out of his own food as well.
JAKE: Dagnabbit.
JAKE: I overseasoned.
DIRK: You can’t overseason Kraft.
DIRK: No seasoning created in paradox space is going to be enough to make up for the bland-ass chemical flavor in those packets. The layers made of paper and plastic are the only thing preventing a full containment breach of chemical nothingness onto the rest of the defenseless Universe.
Despite your low-effort comment Jake laughs, takes maybe three more bites before setting his fork down, and when he de-captchalogues the glass it is again full. The two of you finish the meal to low humming and whispered lyrics, and the fact that you need to well and truly focus to hear whatever the hell he’s saying gives you a headache by the time you’ve taken your last bite.
You notice he does not kiss you. He doesn’t even make an attempt. Nothing on the back of your hand, your forehead, not even blown your way as he takes both your bowls to the sink to rinse. It’s such a drastic contrast from the way he insists on being as close to you as possible in his sober hours, though occasionally his fingers do twitch as if they’re reaching for yours. This observation has roughly a 60% probability of being completely fucking delusional, but it doesn’t stop you from picking up where his humming left off, nor does it stop you from freezing up once he returns and he grins at you like you’ve just shared an inside joke.
JAKE: I suppose anything is truly possible if i make enough of a fucking wish on it.
JAKE: Thank you for your indulgence.
JAKE: Now if youll excuse me.
When his footsteps fade away and the door he closes chimes on its way shut you know what you have to do: you give chase, flashing directly from the kitchen into Jake’s room before he can shut the door firmly. He doesn’t seem put off at all by this, only a little surprised and far more tired, tilting his head in a wordless inquiry.
DIRK: Jake.
DIRK: Who am I?
JAKE: What a ridiculous question.
JAKE: You are dirk.
DIRK: Right.
DIRK: What were you wishing for?
Fuck, wrong path. You correct before he can cease to participate entirely.
DIRK: Don’t answer that. I mean, why do you think I’m "indulging" you?
He looks at you strangely, then replies this—
JAKE: Well last time i checked bro youd dearly departed this plane of reality for good.
JAKE: We are "over" arent we?
As if it’s the most obvious thing in the world, and something about bro instead of darling or dear or god-forbid clementine, the blasé attitude he says it with, the understanding that a part of him still thinks he’s on Earth C and your Candy self has just committed the most spectacular suicide in recorded history makes you realize this was a mistake. While you try to piece yourself together Jake shrugs, flops onto the bed back-first without removing that heavy-ass "cape," and presumably closes his eyes without dozing off. When he speaks again, though, his voice is laced with sleep.
JAKE: You really do ask the strangest things of me.
DIRK: I ask strange things of you.
That earns you a snort, and the carefreeness under that noise is so offensive to you that you have to stop yourself from snapping at him.
JAKE: Well ill concede as much.
JAKE: Sooooooooooooo.
JAKE: What would you like in exchange?
For a few more moments there’s silence, then you wordlessly take off your cape to drape it over his desk chair. The background screen of his computer is set to Neytiri from Avatar. For some reason this calms you right the fuck back down, and only when you remove your shades and set them on (the relatively small empty space left on) Jake’s nightstand do you feel his gaze cross the line from drunk questioning to apprehension.
JAKE: Scandalous.
JAKE: Do you treat all your bedwarmers this way mr strider or should i count my stars lucky tonight?
You tug the entire blanket out from under him and toss it at his head, getting yourself comfortable the right side as he vies to re-orient himself. Moments later he figures out how not to drown in the half-inch-thick thing he calls a simple duvet and throws your portion over you. Much to your muted satisfaction, he’s managed to lose his movie glasses in the meantime; he blinks at you, eyes as vibrant of a green as ever, probably trying to figure out why his vision just dropped to the negatives. There are no bags underneath, but even without them it’s evident just how worn out—the corner of his eyes seem permanently fixed downward, and his typically radiant gaze, which you know from personal experience to be capable of charming anyone into his bed, is frightfully dull. You wonder if, to him, it is worth the trouble of turning himself into kindling just for a longer glimpse at that pretty world he sees through those blue and red tinted glasses.
With impressive accuracy you grab a cork laying around (the scent of wine still clings to it; how recent?) and throw it dead at the light switch, plunging the two of you into darkness. He wolf-whistles, then you press your back to his chest and knock your head lightly against his.
JAKE: Ow.
DIRK: Shut up.
Jake sighs against you, sweet and wretched, alcohol-infused breath tickling the side of your neck. One hand slides onto your waist, though the pressure would’ve been barely-there had you not taken his hand and put it firmly onto your body. He stills; you wait; and when he eventually relaxes down after a quarter-minute, the heady feeling rushing through your chest is nothing short of devastating.
JAKE: Can do.
three:
ROSE: You are sulking.
DIRK: I am not fucking sulking.
ROSE: I’m not sure how effective you still believe childish denial is when anyone within a hundred miles’ vicinity has long outgrown such years——apparently with the exception of you——but you are sulking and you know it.
It’s been like this for a week now. Every morning Rose barges into your office room and demands that you do something or get the fuck going. Every morning you deter her: suggesting that she need extra work to do, asking her whether Terezi is coping with John’s newfound entrance in your lives, or simply shutting the door on her face and refusing to unlock it until she’s gone scouting.
On a few particularly low blows, you’ve brought up the issue of Kanaya. It seems to be a touchier topic with her now that Karkat’s around more often, and is therefore a very efficient card to pull. You doubt it’ll be effective now, though; she’s more persistent than usual.
ROSE: There is progress to be made and work to be done.
ROSE: And really, I wouldn’t even mind whether you exist in a state of Narrative-oriented productivity or focus on "other duties" so long as you’re doing something.
ROSE: None of this brooding you’ve taken to ever since Jake stopped coming around to see you.
DIRK: I applaud your attempt to bite the bullet and just face the issue head-on, I really do.
DIRK: Or I would if you weren’t so dead fucking off the mark, that is.
DIRK: Why would I give a shit whether Jake's coming to see me or not.
ROSE: I can give you an alphabetized list on why you would give a shit.
DIRK: Hard to believe you still don’t know what "going ultimate" actually means, but I can spell it out for you again if you need a lil’ schooling in the ABCs.
DIRK: F-u-c-k y-o-u.
DIRK: Know what that spells?
DIRK: That the past is the past, there’s no fucking point in trying to tie everything I do back to Jake English, and that you should mind your own goddamn business.
DIRK: Maybe we should work a little more on your fine-tuning if the basic ability to read a room is escaping you. A new dataset on how not to be a meddling bitch. You mind taking yourself offline real quick?
Rose looks pained for a second, but you don’t dare assume victory.
ROSE: I don’t need to try to tie you back to Jake.
ROSE: You already do that plenty for yourself.
ROSE: What I am telling you is that while I cannot care less in any capacity whether your existence fundamentally revolves around Jake English or not, I do care for the fact that we have been inert in this corner of paradox space for months.
You blink at that, set aside the journal you’ve been penning away at to glance up to Rose, meeting her roboeyes fully. Some days you entirely regret the fact that you didn’t not give her the eye color of her carbon self, especially when the glossy red (tinted with just a bit of amusement to boot) remind you firmly of bugs more than anything.
DIRK: Months?
ROSE: Three, to be exact.
ROSE: It has been three months and fifteen days since we have made a stop here, i.e. since you have resumed your courtship with Jake——and don’t even question, you know it’s a courtship.
ROSE: He leaves you flowers, for fuck’s sake.
She gestures to the bouquet currently neatly positioned along with the rest of your plants, orange-red roses and tulips and baby’s breaths all neatly tied together with a ribbon that has his fucking kiss mark in black on both ends of it. The two of you share a rare moment of complete agreement as to how ludicrous that is, then you say the only thing you can think to reply with.
DIRK: Listen, Lalonde. Just because you don’t get any—
ROSE: That is not only factually inaccurate but entirely hypocritical—
DIRK: Doesn’t mean you have to start shitting on how Jake and I are doing.
DIRK: Which, and I cannot emphasis this hard enough, I’m emphasizing so goddamn hard that it’s going straight through the floor of this custom made ship and being dispersed into the rest of paradox space at the speed of light so that Trisolarians can intercept my signal and cause an intergalactic war over it,
ROSE: Sometimes I question if we even read the same book or if you simply take pleasure in a gross appropriation any given storyline.
DIRK: LLet me clarify this for you. We are, absolutely, not.
ROSE:
ROSE: You are not...?
DIRK: We are not.
ROSE: Very well.
ROSE: I suppose then you will have no complaints when we make headway into our next destination, father mine?
You fall silent to that, and Rose makes a robotically judgmental noise; you wonder what the point is behind intentionally neglecting to give her eyebrows if she’s just (somehow) going to level the exact same look at you anyway.
ROSE: Dirk.
DIRK: Rose.
ROSE: Go talk to him.
DIRK: There’s no need to.
DIRK: They don’t even know where he is.
ROSE: They know now.
ROSE: He came back yesterday morning.
You are… unsure how you react to that. All you know is that your eyes tighten behind the shades, though you refuse to allow them to fall shut nor have the sigh escape your lips, and you just nod with the realization that yeah, fuck, maybe the two of you should talk.
two:
When John Egbert appears at the doorstep of your ship just a few days later, you carefully survey the crowd at hand for the reactions. Namely, you are dead focused on Terezi and her reaction the fact that her captchalogued ex-boyfriend/hate-pailmate just showed up at her front desk with no recollection of the fact that they did, indeed, fuck in his own dad’s car at some point in their mutual lifespans.
That, or John has developed an impressive poker face over the years. He still bluhs at the high quality Earth-C blended tea Rose pours out for him, and he still looks around your interior design choices with all the scrutiny of a high school band director, but he does bite the judgmental words back (a trait he and Jane seems to share, somehow) and politely nods as the four of you sit down. He has the decency to take one sip of his drink before dropping the plutonium bomb on you.
JOHN: so, where’s jake, anyway?
The comment, had you been any less seasoned in the arts of a resting bitch face, would have caused you to give a violent start. Terezi’s attention is honed into the topic at hand in seconds, as is Rose’s, and you choose your next words exceedingly carefully.
DIRK: I don’t know what you mean.
JOHN: come on, dude.
JOHN: i’m almost sure he’s locked up in whatever homoerotic version you guys have for a fight clu—
TEREZI: W3LL F1RST RUL3 OF F1GHT CLUB—
ROSE: Oh, for the love of—
DIRK: Shut up. All of you shut up. If I have to ban every David Fincher flick off the face of this realm I’ll fucking do it.
JOHN: okay, okay! jeez.
JOHN: note to self, never say the words fight club again.
JOHN: also, please don’t ban david fincher, i really like the alien series.
JOHN: and jake likes indiana jones so he’ll throw a fit if he finds out i got it removed.
JOHN: speaking of which, seriously, where is he? in some kind of...
His face sours.
JOHN: dungeon?
There’s a beat, then before Terezi can make the obvious low-hanging joke about sex dungeons John slaps a hand over her mouth. She presumably licks him, much to his displeasure; he wipes the remains of teal saliva directly onto her coat jacket; she looks at him indignantly and he god-honest sticks his tongue out in response. The mundanity of the interaction, as well as the bone-chilling knowledge that despite everything John really hasn’t changed at all, seems to be disorienting Rose. Her roboface makes a great work of not showing it, but you can tell—you are her creator, after all.
DIRK: To be clear, he’s not in a dungeon, or in a fight club.
DIRK: At least not ours. Not that we own anything like that.
DIRK: We don’t know where he is.
ROSE: "We"?
DIRK: Fine, I don’t know where he is.
DIRK: I haven’t seen him since I last saw him.
John mutters something under his breath that suspiciously sounds like every sixty seconds in africa, but you allow the quip to slide for the bigger purpose of finding out why exactly John thinks you all have Jake held hostage.
JOHN: well, because i haven’t seen him for a week.
DIRK:
DIRK: What?
JOHN: what?
DIRK: Did you just,
DIRK: Forget about it.
DIRK: Are you telling me he’s gone missing?
JOHN: i guess?
JOHN: i don’t think he’s the type to go missing, though.
JOHN: i thought he was just busy with you, but seeing as you have no idea...
He frowns, bites his lips down in a way that’s more implicative than he likely intends it to be—and you feel something in your chest harden at the realization that Jake’s disappeared, again, and before grief can settle you morph it into bitterness, into anger, into the emotions that typically surface later.
DIRK: Huh.
DIRK: Well, we don’t know where he is.
Your voice is even as you confirm, and Rose doesn’t call you out on the usage of plural pronouns again, instead choosing to remain silent; you desperately wish she wouldn’t. John quiets for a moment, observing you, waiting for you to conjure the correct answer out of your ass the same way Jane would, though his eyes are not brimming with grimness or apathy or resentment or whatever the hell Jane Crocker feels when she thinks of you nowadays. It is instead a much more kind and damning thing that he nods, simply drains the rest of his cup, and thanks the three of you for your time.
You abscond to your room and try to fight off the bile rising in your throat.
one:
It’s mid-strife when you realize that Jake never aims for your head. Out of all the machinations he’s designed just for you, decapitation—or any other kind of injury to your head—is never a part of it. You’d just considered it as his lack of will to kill you outright (been there, done that, no fun in ending it early) but you now wonder vaguely if there’s some other reason for it. Impulse seizes at you almost instantly, and you go against your own self preservation not to dodge the switchblade coming in to embed itself in your throat.
You will not die from this. If you can be certain about anything regarding Jake it’s that he doesn’t want you dead, so after disregarding the risk of certain execution there’s no reason not to. But when Jake twists the sharp edge towards himself so fast you don’t even see the shift coming, when he releases some inhumanely strangled gasp in the process, and when you see that he’s just broken his own fucking wrist trying not to stab you in the neck you feel a wash of guilt entirely unrelated to your own almost-detriment. You tear your eyes away from the rapidly purpling area to the shitty 3D glasses on Jake’s face, attempting to read his reaction behind that opaque and gaudy persona before it’s gone, and find yourself lucky: fear is inscribed onto each single wrinkle on his face, the creases and the lines, his hard-set jawline. The novelty of the fact that his furrowed brow and grit teeth are for reasons entirely other than fury pauses you despite the disadvantages of that, including but not limited to "potential death" and "emotional devastation."
As you pant and collect your breath and calm your thrumming heartbeat from going haywire over the fact that you nearly just died (and maybe something else), as Jake stands completely and utterly still for another five seconds staring at your neck—haunted—you get two distinct feelings.
One, you have finally learned how you might crack Jake English. Two, you have just fucked up.
So you are the first to break the tension. Your own fingers twitch, his eyes laser in on that instead like a cat chasing light, and with a flick of your fingers you captchalogue your sword away, catching his broken wrist in your hand before he can abscond. Reflexively he hisses in pain but otherwise stays quiet, watching you with a motion exhausted and wary, as if at any moment you’ll take this chance and slice his wrist off whole. From a purely medical perspective, you consider it—the thing’s going to be a bitch to heal, and sometimes it’s just easier to re-grow.
Instead of doing any of the things you pathetically want to, you turn the wrist over in your hand. He’s managed to nick himself in the process, and for some reason it’s a relief and sin at once to see him bleed red. You trace the injury with your thumb, careful not to press too harshly, wondering if you can get him to make that noise again; he doesn’t indulge you, and when you look up at him again there’s a fucking smile on his face.
JAKE: Something the matter darling?
You drop his arm like it burns.
DIRK: Put ice on it.
Then you turn away and fly off, refusing to make eye contact any longer, feeling as if the weight of the world has just cascaded into your heart. And when you notice a drop of Jake’s blood on the tip of your fingers, wet and glistening and charming for some God-unknown reason, you suck it off yourself.