Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Pedal-pedal, long chord, rundown, C#, trip-a-let-trip-a-let manual switch duh-digga-duh, rest one-two and flick out the next stop, left hand to top manual, hard part- thirty-six thirty-six thirty-six pedal pedal pedal, foot slipped, recover, rundown #2 both hands, major pedal minor major pedal minor minor digga digga digga digga trip-a-let ding-dong-

You keep your hands frozen over the keys for an embarrassing amount of time, all like, ‘where did that sound come from? I didn’t play that,’ until you realize it was your doorbell. Ha ha, wow. Organs don’t make ding-dong noises! What are you even thinking.

You suppose you have to go answer the door. You groan at the distraction, because you really need to solidify what you like to call the ‘John Egbert Throws The Beat Down: Movement Four, Yet Another Organ Solo’ section before tonight’s practice. You slip your feet out from the pedal keyboard, and put them in your yellow slippers you set next to your portable organ for exactly this purpose. Can’t have your mysterious solicitor seeing your really grody man-feet, that would be shitty of you.

You walk to your front door, open it, and greet the mailman standing with a package he wants you to sign for. A package? Wow! This development is entirely unexpected due to your lack of recent internet shopping, but you are a gentleman. You won’t complain, and will accept the burden of this surprise gift with dignity (heh heh).

You sign for it, heft it up, and take it into your hip Seattle apartment. It’s a standard cardboard box, the kind that lazy video game designers put in shooter games when they need some clutter. The label on the top is addressed to you, in your sister’s handwriting, and has some unknown address as the return. You’re not sure where your sister has been living for the past… uh, ever… so that could be her current residence for all you know.

You wonder why she sent you a package. She’s coming up for a long visit in a few days to see you in a very important concert. Couldn’t she have just waited until then to give you… whatever? You set the box on the kitchen counter, dig your keys out of your pocket, and rip the brown tape with them. You open up the flaps and look inside.

It’s a bunch of black clothing. Does Jade want you to restart your emo kid phase? Because that was for three months in middle school and no one enjoyed it, not even you. You pick up one of the shirts and hold it in front of you. It’s really huge and oversized, with a slogan in white that says “Rickman’s Auto Parts 2006 Beef Eating Champion.” Okay, that’s kind of hilarious in a terrible way, maybe she sent you it as a joke? Even though your sis isn’t usually this funny.

Your shirt-moving dislodged something else though, something shiny and reflective in the black mess of bad clothing. You ruffle through the box to get at it, and lift it from all the hokey catch phrase t-shirts.

It’s a mirror. A really gross, dirty mirror. You can barely even see yourself in the round, cracked glass, the edge of your chin the only part visible in the fogged up surface. You turn the mirror over, and the back is black stone, featuring a jagged, carved sun that’s about the height of your hand. Well, that’s freaky. It looks really old too, should you even be touching this thing?

If Jade sent it to you, she must have wanted you to have it. She usually has really good gifts for you too, what was she thinking? Ironic box of gothic goodies? No way, Jade would totally not send you anything remotely close to that, she’s not very subtle with her humor. This box of emo memorabilia must have come from the heart. Maybe you’ll like it more if you clean it up.

When you set the mirror next to the sink, your phone rings with the sweet sweet sounds of 8-bit ‘who ya gonna call-.’ What good timing, it’s Jade.

“Hey hey J-J,” you say, picking up the phone. You turn on the sink, then squeeze out a sponge. “What’s up?”

“Oh my god, don’t call me J-J, you were talking to Dave again, weren’t you?” You hear the noise of some kind of movie in the background. By the sound of those sweet melodic notes, it’s Hitch. Good choice, not really like your sister to pick that kind of movie of her own free will. Maybe someone else is over at her place. You hold the phone between your ear and shoulder, and pick up the mirror with your non-sponged hand.

“Um, maybe. Or maybe I just thought of a new, awesome nickname for you!” You start washing the glass, and the dirt comes off nice and easy. “By the way, I just got a package from you in the mail and it’s filled with ugly t-shirts and some other weird stuff, what’s the deal with it?”

“Oh, no! You got it early? That’s what I was calling about!” she says. She sounds nervous. “You weren’t supposed to open it, that’s all Karkat’s stuff. We couldn’t fit everything in my motorcycle so I shipped it ahead of time before we head towards your place. Anyway, don’t touch the objects in there, you’ll-”

Oh, right, Karkat. Jade’s super, super weird new boy toy. You’re not exactly sure why she couldn’t have just kept dating Dave. You like Dave, Dave is a total dweeb and safe for your dear precious virginal innocent sibling. Karkat is…

You’re not sure how to describe him. Weird? Pent-up with incomprehensible rage? A smooth talker, but in the loudest way possible? Eerie, but in the way American horror movies are eerie as opposed to Japanese ones? You haven’t met him in person, exactly, but you’ve seen pictures and heard his scratchy voice yell at you over the phone and while he’s absolutely hilarious in every way, shape, and form, there’s just something not right about him. You can’t put your thumb on it, like, he kind of seems like he’s not really here. Like he’s used to totally different lifestyle and is just kind of drifting by until he can get it back.

Maybe he was from a rich family or something? But a rich kid probably wouldn’t have what appears to be legitimate tribal tattoos covering his whole body. And those ear lobe holes he has are so big, eugh. It makes you uncomfortable to look at them, and you’re not sure why.

“-and especially don’t touch the skull in that box. Did you touch the skull? Because that is a real ram skull!”

Oh, right, Jade is talking. Wait, does that mean Karkat considers an animal's skull a necessary item for a two month visit at your place? Jeez, you’re totally going to have to dig that out of the box later. “Sorry Jade, I wasn’t listening. Could you-”

You guess you weren’t paying attention to the mirror, because there’s a quiet ‘crack’ under your sponge, followed by a larger ‘thunk,’ followed by the glass exploding into a humongous cloud of dust.

You drop the phone onto the kitchen floor, try to jump back as fast as you can because you don’t want any of this shit in your skin or airway. But it’s too late. The poof of immensely small splinters was too big, encompassing your arms and neck and face, and it is a very very good thing you were wearing glasses because you would definitely lose some amount of eyesight for some amount of time from this little accident. You try not to breathe as the glass settles into your skin, quietly, with no pain.

Standing stock still, you flash back to the time you accidentally poked that pink insulation fiberglass stuff. Your finger hurt every time you touched something for days after. If this tiny glass is all over you now… What happens if you won’t make it to the cathedral tonight? You really need to rehearse.

“John? John!?” says Jade, from the floor of your kitchen. “Are you okay?”

You bend down to the ground, your airway getting tight, then breathe out very very carefully. You don’t want to rub more of the glass in than you have to with excess movement! “Sorry, Jade,” you say. “Call you back.”

You slowly reach out to hang up, then stand again. You leave the sink running, because fuck it you’re covered in glass, and hobble your way to your bathroom. Even the slight wind against your forearms causes sharp little shots of feeling to tingle up your skin, but your bathroom’s not far anyway and you’ve got a positive outlook on life! No lasting damage from this weird accident, no-sir-ee. Not if you have anything to say about it.

You turn the shower on, then step in after waiting for it to get to a manageable temperature, clothes and all. No taking chances with your health! That’s what the homoerotic science safety videos always taught you, and you intend to follow them to the letter! Well, minus sharing your shower with a dudely high school dude, you might get arrested for that one.

You’ve been standing there for about five minutes, all of which you’ve measured by humming your incredible phone ringtone two in a half times, when your vision starts to swim.

You freak out for a second that maybe glass did get in your eyes and you are going blind, but the kind of foggy blackness fading in and out of your sight isn’t like that. This is more of the kind of blackness you get when you’re drunk and tired. Or when you donated blood way back when and fainted. Are you going to faint? Oh, shit.

You sit down in the tub, your back and neck supported by the white ceramic, and have a slight freakout as your head gets light. Why are you fainting? Someone’s going to notice if you die alone in the shower, right? Jade will call a million times and Dave’s terrible snapchats will never get returned and the orchestra and choir are going to be without their organ player and your dad will totally notice if they all don’t and-

You slip into unconsciousness.

**************

You’re having a dream, you know it.

You know it because you so easily passed from sleep into la-la land, fast enough to be lucid and aware that everything’s different from your bathroom. You appear to be point blank in some kind of painted-up living room created by somebody who had gotten all their interior design decorating advice from an off brand version of The Road To El Dorado. Huge mosaics of some abstract people shapes line the walls in front of you and wicked-looking stone carvings grace the corners. A whole mess of delicate beaded curtains block what’s probably the entrance to the room. You’re lounging against a bunch of pillows stacked together in a shape oddly reminiscent of the back of your bathtub. Guess your brain wasn’t being very creative, and also probably slightly racist, when it decided to smash together a scene.

Of course, the weird part of this dream is that you don’t feel like you’re asleep. You’ve never had a dream this clear, your dreams are usually just misty, cloudy things where you stumble around in your underwear at a carnival filled with grody clowns. You look down, and yes, pants still on, thank god.

The lack of devious harlequins might be rectified unfortunately soon, as you hear the beaded curtains start to rattle with movement. Man, if a whole squad of clowns comes through to raid your bad “ancient Mexican” themed party you are going to be so pissed. You are going to have to go to dream therapy sessions or something, maybe.

The hand that brushes aside the curtain is definitely not attached to a painted up monstrosity. However, it is definitely attached to a completely balls-to-the-wall naked human. Your first reaction is to start throwing pillows at her while yelling towards the ceiling, ‘I thought I stopped having these kinds of dreams at age 13, brain!’ But you don’t do this for three reasons.

One: she’s got horns. Two asymmetrical, spiral horns jutting from the crown of her messy black hair. One of them kind of looks like a wrench. Which you guess is kind of an original character design aspect? Good on you, self.

Two: her eyes are pure white. Full on creepypasta blank, no pupils, just lifeless white orbs. That is not a very original character design aspect, that’s like your 15 year old-era anime OC, fuck that.

Three: she is built. You’re a pretty tall dude, but she’s easily over six feet, shaped from head to toe with full-grown muscle. She must have had a lot of dream-plastic surgery for that look, holy shit. Every part of her is as modeled as all those classic Greek sculptures you saw in Italy that one time, minus the tacked on leafy greens over genitalia.

So, all you can do is say, “Uh. Hi?”

She smirks, raises her lip, and purrs at you. Which is totally hilarious, but you’re kind of afraid of her kicking your dream-self in half with those thunder thighs, so you don’t laugh. She flips her long hair back in the second most gaudy gesture you’ve ever seen in your life, then trails her hands down her whole body in the most gaudy gesture you’ve ever seen in your life. You realize, with a dawning horror, that this is one of those dreams you haven’t had since you were 13. You can’t say you were missing out on much, honestly, watching this lady do a poor-man’s burlesque routine while already naked is like watching a banana peel itself.

She does this weird dance thing, and you can’t tell if the technique is bad or it’s just you. Either way, your eyebrows raise to new, judgmental heights at this truly awful apparition your mind summoned up for you. She twirls her wrists above her head, wiggles her hips around, and generally tries to act all sensual and whatnot. You have a feeling this would be better if she was wearing bells or those bellydancer scarf things, because the jingles created by this dance would be a legendary thing to hear.

She crouches down all ‘sexy huntress,’ and begins to crawl slowly, on all fours, towards you. You can feel your face wrinkling itself into the most ‘what the fuck’-brand wince, a wince which is usually only reserved for Dave Strider snapchats. You hope your real-self is making this expression alone in the bathtub, that would be funny if someone walked in seeing that.

Your generated dream stripper-minus-clothing apparently does not get the hint, and crawls right up into your lap. Her arms rest themselves heavy against your totally pathetic, music-major chest and if you weren’t afraid of her ripping you apart before, you are definitely afraid now. She’s got some kind of black lipstick on, and when she puckers ‘em up all in your face, you can’t help but speak up.

“Whoa, hey, no, shhhh,” you say, putting your hand on her mouth. “I’m not really feeling up to this right now! Or, ever, actually. Sorry, dream girl! I’d be okay with just makeouts, but you look like you’re in the mood for more than that. And since you really don’t have the agency to woo the rare boner or two out of me, as you are fake and I am not, I can’t ever see us getting jiggy with it. Sorry!”

She makes this face that speaks a thousand words. A thousand words of confusion, rejection, and total anger. You can basically see the steam coming off of her. She smacks your hand away with her own, pushes her pointer finger into your chest, and says with fire lapping at the end of every syllable,

“Yziuvtz ztztliuvitztcoti ciltrwxyin, nixwylzn!?”

“Yeah,” you say, nodding earnestly, because that’s what you do when you can’t understand people’s accents. “Yeah, that.”

She looks at you with utter disgust, her tongue with at least eight tiny piercings sticking out and eyebrows narrowing her eyes into tiny little slits, but you don’t get to see what happens after that because you wake up.

Still in the shower, clothes on, the pads on your fingers wrinkled to all hell.

You look at the clock on your wall— you were asleep for forty-five minutes. Bleh, and you wanted to get more practicing in before dinner, too! Fuck that weird mirror, and fuck your penchant for cleanliness, that was something you really didn’t want to deal with today. You turn off the shower, and stand up, patting your hands against yourself to check for any glass-splinter pain. You don't feel anything, so either the glass absorbed itself into your skin so far it's never coming out again, or the water washed it all away.

You sigh. You suppose it’s a good thing you’re going to the cathedral for practice today, you feel like you need to confess for some kind of sin or another after that dream. And you’re not even Catholic.

Chapter Text

You’re the assistant organ director at the largest Catholic congregation in Washington.

It’s almost unheard of for someone fresh out of college to be in this kind of position. The old-hat Christian fuddy duddies don’t really like giving away high-paying music jobs to under-fifty fresh meat like you. But you managed to convince them! You’re good. You don’t think you’re the type of person to toot your own horn, but you know you do a few things very very well in life, and playing the organ is probably at least number three on the list of ‘John Egbert’s Best Practices.’

(Number one is ‘movie trivia pub quizzes’ and number two is ‘practical jokes’).

You don’t really think about it too often, you just kind of like playing your instrument and tend to go with whatever life brings you and your dexterous piano hands. You’re extremely happy with your job, and not just because you really fucking love church music. You also get a lot of opportunities to play with some skilled groups who can match you note for note on the massive pipe organs. Your cathedral serves as a pretty incredible concert venue, and you’re in high demand!

On the rare occasion, someone will write an entertaining and challenging piece for you to debut in church. And on even rarer occasions, that composer will be someone with a recognizable name. And on the rarest, most special, once-in-a-lifetime occasions, there will be a full blown orchestra and choir to play your piece with you at a high-profile, televised event.

Which is, in fact, what you’re practicing for right now.

You hold the final note, two pedalboard presses, three fingers on each hand on the two bottom manuals —then lift, the empty church bellowing with your massive sound. You wait an appropriate amount of time, for dramatic effect of course, before ceasing the sound, leaving only an echo you can’t hear.

Your earplugs are in, after all. They’re custom molded! Safety first, you don’t want to damage your eardrums.

You pluck them out, jam them in your pocket, and hear the clapping of the organ director from the front pew on the south side. Well, she’s sort of clapping, she’s got a broken wrist so it kind of turns out floppy and a little pathetic. You swivel on the seat towards her and wave.

“Alright, be harsh!” you say to her. “What’s the feedback?”

The organ director is the kind of lady who dresses up all fancy to church, even though it’s a Thursday night and literally nobody’s around to judge her. Except the Lord, you guess, but you’re pretty sure she’s not dressing for Him. She’s got on a big floppy black brimmed hat and a semi-sparkly green dress, which is the least Catholic ensemble you could ever think of. She smiles, all perfect white teeth, and says, “The same as always, dear.”

You frown. “Lame. I didn’t get better at all?”

“Might I remind you it’s not a ‘get better’ schema you’re after? You’re simply playing with the wrong tone. Your technique is perfect, as always, your notes impeccable, your sound pure and unwavering. But, my dear, you’re flighty. You’re a little flighty bird when you play, all ready to ‘pip pip hop’ over the keys.”

She stands up, and makes a gesture like she’s an evil wizard standing over a giant crystal ball. Her voice booms throughout the four wings of the cathedral. “Your fingers are not supposed to be silly little birds, twittering back and forth! Your fingers are supposed to be Saint John, breaking the seven seals to the end of the world! Breaking the book to shower doom itself upon your wary listeners! Your sound should not be so light, should not be wind-chimes, your sound should be the four horsemen themselves! Chords in G ripping from the hurricane-filled sky on black horses, arrhythmic patterns raining blood onto the audience, minor scales rumbling with the hunger from desperate famine, and the bellows of the organ representing the choir of Christian martyrs calling to the Lord for absolute justice!”

“Uh, I thought that part was supposed to be, you know, the actual choir.”

She waves her healthy wrist to dismiss you. “I was always critical of voices. Could never compete with my full set of pipes.”

She’s been telling you this same thing every Thursday, when you get to play the bigger church organ. ‘More oomph’ she says. ‘More force’ she says. ‘Make it sound more German, here, spit this with me, Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln’ she says. You can’t even argue with that last one, you’ve always been bad at that ‘fire and brimstone, das deutchland’ style of music. You play to have fun! Not warn people of the upcoming Jesus-apocalypse. It’s kind of hard to play organ with an angry feeling in your heart and a German scowl on your face when you’re having such a good time.

“Of course,” she says. “The audience won’t notice, as they’re uneducated. And you will mesh to the Berlin Philharmonic beautifully as it stands right now. But I’d like to see it at it’s best before the premiere, as best as you can make it. But I’m not worried, dear. You were selected to be the soloist in this piece for a reason.”

It’s because you don’t get tired. It’s because your fingers never bleed, because your feet don’t cramp, because you don’t sweat and slip, because your callouses are tough as nails. Because not a lot of people could do this.

You get fifty minutes of technically challenging, objectively impressive solos. You counted.

On the drive back to your apartment, you try to get in the mood of your piece. More of that old school, repressed Christian anger! Maybe you should prepare for The Book with Seven Seals: A Modern Revisitation by reading Revelations or something. But, meh, that honestly sounds kind of boring.

When you get back home and flick on your lights, you see the broken mirror you threw haphazardly on the living room couch before leaving. Oh, yeah, you should probably text Jade about that, you feel kind of bad. You pull out your phone.

hey jade! sorry i hung up on you earlier, i dug around in karkat’s package (heh heh) before you called and pulled out this dirty mirror thing, and accidentally broke it. it shattered all over and i don’t think it’s repairable. :(
i'm really sorry! tell him i'll make it up to him somehow.

She takes ten minutes to respond.

oh okay hold on im giving the phone to him

You want to text back “wait, what, no.” but you can’t because Karkat is the fastest typer you have ever come into contact with in your life. By the time you blink, he’s literally sent three texts of entirely capslock, entirely hilarious anger ranting.

OH, HA HA, FUNNY THAT, TRUST THE AMERICAN POSTAL SERVICE FOR TWO SECONDS TO DELIVER A PACKAGE TO AN HONEST-JOHN AND THAT JOHN TURNS OUT TO BE NOT SO HONEST AT ALL!
THAT JOHN TURNS OUT TO BE A VIOLENT MURDERER OF IRREPLACEABLE HISTORICAL ITEMS!!!
THAT JOHN TURNS OUT TO BE A LITERAL CULTURAL ARTIFACT DESTROYER, WHO ATTEMPTS TO APOLOGIZE THROUGH TEXT BASED MEDIA INSTEAD OF FACE TO FUCKING FACE LIKE A GOOD HUMAN SHOULD!!!!!!
sorry dude, i guess i could have called.
i didn’t want to interrupt whatever weird stuff you and jade were probably up to and i shouldn’t ask ab
INCREDIBLY NORMAL, MUNDANE COITAL ACTIVITIES. WHY.
dammit. i don’t want to know.
anyway sorry! i was trying to clean it up and be nice.
but i didn’t know it was historically significant?
i never pegged you for an artifact collector. since you’re probs the type who breaks everything they touch :B
WELL SURPRISE, PLOT TWIST, NEWS FLASH, THAT IS TOTALLY WHAT I AM. AN ARTIFACT COLLECTOR.
DEFINITELY.
THERE IS NO OTHER THING I WOULD EVER BE.
BESIDES FOR ONE WHO COLLECTS ARTIFACTS.
LIKE YOUR INDIANA JONES MEDIA CONGLOMERATE, WHOM I FEEL IS REPRESENTATIVE OF MY INNER SOUL IN ALL WAYS. THAT IS ASSUREDLY ME.
um……
okay? uh, sorry again for breaking it!
HONESTLY? I DON’T REALLY GIVE A SHIT. IT JUST REMINDED ME OF AN OLD FRIEND, I GUESS.
BUT WE ALL LIVE AND LEARN THROUGH CARELESS AND PREVENTABLE ACCIDENTS WHICH FORCE US TO OVERCOME POINTLESS FEELINGS OF NOSTALGIA AND GROW THE FUCK UP.
THANKS, BUTTERFINGERS.
you're welcome?
I’LL BERATE YOU MORE ONCE WE GET THERE. JADE SAYS, AND I QUOTE, “leaving tomorrow be there four nights from now SHOUTPOLE SHOUTPOLE SMILEY FACE.”
okay tell her to drive safe. don't get hit by a semitruck or anything.
THAT WAS POIGNANTLY SPECIFIC AND WEIRDLY REFERENTIAL, BUT I PROMISE IT WON’T HAPPEN. I’M AN EXPERIENCED BACK-OF-MOTORBIKE PASSENGER AT THIS POINT.

You put away your earplugs in their special case, brush your teeth, wash your face, and scroll through Reddit for half an hour on your laptop before crawling into bed. You had a weird day, but at least now it’s off to normal dreamland. With some normal clowns and some normal running around in your underwear and no uncomfortably muscular naked women attempting to seduce you. Right?

Right?

***********

You’re on the couch in your living room, daylight shining through your windows, and a girl who’s petite as anything sitting across from you in your armchair. Your armchair is scooted way the hell forward, messing up the sick feng suei flow you’ve totally got going, so your knees are almost touching hers. She also appears to be wearing your 13 year old self’s favorite outfit, topped with an old pair of wirey 80s aviator lenses you once found in a garbage dump.

“What. The fuck,” you say. “Am I dreaming? Is this a dream? It doesn’t feel like a dream.”

“Yeah, you’re dreaming! Duh!” the girl says. She’s got a deep voice for such a tiny body.

“Why are you wearing my black slime shirt? And that ugly army jacket?”

“It was the only good outfit you had in your head! I should know, I’ve been digging around in there for hoooooooours now, and boy, have times changed since I’ve last been out! Had to learn a whole new language and everything! Of course, it wasn’t a problem for little old me, since I’m pretty much an expert at the fine art of information gathering.” She flips her hair behind her shoulder, in the exact same way as…

“Oh, hey, you’re the sexy dream dancer! What’s with the new getup?”

She grins, then fans herself as though she’s overheating from her own hotness. Ha, she wishes. “My cunning analysis determined you were threatened by my physical superiority, so I scaled it back a massive amount in order for your brain to handle it.”

“Wow, all that clothing must be stifling.”

She takes you seriously, which is pretty funny. “Sure is! Don’t know how you can stand it.”

You wonder why you’re dreaming about miss seductress again. Is your brain trying to tell you something? ‘Stop not having sex’? ‘This is your punishment for breaking Karkat’s mirror’? ‘You’re secretly into girls who are either thin as a wire and 4’10” or built like a wrestler and 6’6” AND NOTHING IN BETWEEN’? It could be any of those, really.

“Anyway, John, you can call me Vriska! That’s not my real name, of course, but my real name is waaaaaaaay too long to be pronounced by average people like you. And you need something short and succinct to cry out…” she leans forward on the armchair, and her eyebrows waggle at you at warp speed. “… in your throes of passion!”

You gasp in mock-shock, and clutch at your breast. “Ooo, I might swoon! Vri-su-ka!”

“That’s the spirit!” she pumps her fist. “I am going to send you into so many visceral throes!”

“All the throes!”

“Now you’re getting it!”

You can’t help but laugh. Your new imaginary friend seems really dense, but in an adorable way? You wonder why your brain dreamed this kind of character up for you. “Vriska, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you won’t actually be sending me into any visceral throes. I’m not really into the sex thing, so I won’t be having any ‘John Gone Wild’ dreams involving you anytime soon.”

She folds her arms, and sulks into the armchair, sliding down the back so she’s slouching. “Ugh, I know already! I found that out like, hours ago during some really embarrassing high school memory of yours I was watching! I can’t believe the only guy I run into for like, eight billion years is completely immune to my charms. What kind of person doesn’t want to have sex at all? It totally throws a wrench in our devious plans.”

You wonder what ‘plans’ dream girl has, and you wonder if they’re your plans by proxy since your own brain thought them up, or she’s just oblivious. You don’t get a chance to ask, because she’s already launched into another slew of questions.

“Why don’t you want to fuck some fine, incredibly sexy lady in your imagination? Why won’t you fall prey to my supernatural seductions? I don’t get it!”

You shrug. “I mean, it’s not you. You are probably very attractive and arousing? But I’m not really into it? Never have been.”

“Have you ever even had-” She looks up all of a sudden, like she’s trying to recall some difficult memory or another, then flicks her eyes back to you. “Okay then, I guess you have.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t really do anything for me? Even if the stars aligned and I’ve got a killer boner, it’s more appealing to just be making my partner feel nice as opposed to what’s happening downstairs. I mean if I really like her, sure, I’ll definitely go with it when I can! And I’ll maybe like it if she does! But-” Bluh, what are you doing, revealing your sexual habits to a dream fragment. You don’t want to talk about it that much, even if you’re only chatting with some weird lady version of your subconscious, so you’ll just turn this into a joke. “Hey, wait, this is a n-s-f-w conversation we are having! Will we need to wash out your mouth with soap afterwards?”

“Pfft, you’re the one talking, not me.”

“If you want to do it with me, dream girl, why don’t you get to know me? We can go on dream dates! Get dream milkshakes at the dream soda fountain and maybe our straws will slip and our lips will touch and it will be very romantic.”

“Wow, yeah, that sounds like the absolute worst! If I were to take you on a date John, we’d go someplace amazing. Maybe a pirate cove! Go diving for buried treasure!”

“That sounds kind of cool actually?”

“Yup! And we’re in a dream! I can make anything happen inside your impressionable head.”

“Then go for it! Let’s go on lots of pirate themed dates or whatever.”

“Yeah, that was the greatest idea I’ve ever had.” You can’t tell if she’s joking or not, but you laugh anyways. She hesitates, her eyes narrowing. “When’s your concert again?”

“Two weeks?”

“… There’s not enough time.” she says. “I’ll have to keep digging through your head.”

Fucking you and watching you perform at a very biblical concert do not seem like related topics at all! You were kind of missing that special brand of nonsensical dream logic, you were wondering where it was. “Dream girl, why do you want to fuck me so bad? I know I’m a lady-killer, but… I’m not that hot, am I?”

She shrugs. “You’re okaaaaaaaay. It’s just that I want to give you a really useful gift. It’ll probably be the best gift you’ll ever get in the history of ever! And some good old fashioned penetrative boning is the only way I can give it to you.”

“Your gift is your vagi-”

“No! Jeez, I’m just going to give you some things I haven’t used in years and years. And you’re perfect for it! I guess I used up all my luck on the fact you have the right mind to receive my incredible gift, since your eternally floppy dick is kind of a downer. But I can’t try for someone else, because your dumbass fingers decided to break my mirror into yourself instead of just looking in the glass like a normal person would have. I could have just communicated with you through your own reflection, but noooooooo, you had to do it the hard way.”

That makes you start. Your dream vision relating her weird, awkward schemes to an event that happened in real life is a little unsettling. Vriska looks at her wrist, a watch you owned at 19 strapped to it, and says, “Oh, lame, your alarm’s about to go off. Why do you even get up this early on a weekday?”

“Um, I like to start the day fresh? Also, I have lots of administrative stuff to do for my organ playing job.”

“Yaaaaaaaawn,” she says, while mock-yawning. “Well, see you later. Oh, and one more thing before you go— you know that shouty guy your sister hangs around with?”

“Yeah?”

Her eyes grow wide, her smile falls, and she whispers with an urgency that doesn’t seem to fit her, “Don’t tell him.”

You wake up.

Chapter Text

You’re surprised to dream of her again the next night.

You either clearly have a problem, or you’ve been playing too many Nixon-era new-age-y songs in Mass lately. Those pieces with their funky fresh beats tend to mess with your head in all the wrong ways. Although you can’t say they’ve ever caused repetitive dreams about funny blank-eyed girls trying to woo you.

As she promised, you’re in a pirate cove. The weather is on the verge of major hurricane, thick gray storm clouds swarming above you, drawn like a magnet towards the fading orange sun. Waves crash against the craggy stone under you, oozing wet and warm between your toes. The cove is all rock, a thin layer of black holding little patches of sea water in its craters. The muggy hot wind blows your hair back and sends warm salt spraying into your glasses and you can’t help but think...

That this is pretty cool! Storms on the coast are one of your favorite things! You’re not sure how your head can think up such realistic stuff like this. Maybe you should request more new age church music so you can dream up things like this more often? Must be all that 60s hippie spirit gospel channeling through the organ into your imagination.

Vriska’s also here. She’s kind-of-sort-of back to her Greek statue form, but proportioned more realistically. Like she’d be on the cover of one of those junky lady magazines you see when you check out at the grocery store. Photoshop perfect brown skin, wearing nothing but wet hair and a goofy smirk. She walks towards you over the rock, sashaying like Jessica Rabbit, and oh goddammit, she’s trying to seduce you again, isn’t she? You’ll play dumb just to mess with her.

“Wow,” you say, deadpan. “Your eyes really match your outfit.”

Vriska stops in her tracks. There’s a low rumble of thunder in the distance, heard between the crashing of the ocean waves. “My eyes don’t have pupils, dumbass.”

“Yeah, get it?” you say. “Because you’re not wearing anything.”

She throws her arms down in defeat, groans, and goes back to 4’10” Vriska in a blink of your fake dream eyeballs. You like short Vriska a lot better, especially when said Vriska is wearing clothing. Although it’s weird she picked your old friend Rose’s dark purple swimsuit to wear. Purple doesn’t seem to suit her, or the sun on the front for that matter, and you wonder what your brain is trying to tell you with that character costuming choice.

“Well, it was worth another shot,” she says. “Anyway, how do you like my awesome date spot? We’re going to go diving for treasure!”

“Swimming? On this date!?” you say, gasping in feigned horror. “Swimming in a storm isn’t safe! Didn’t you learn that in elementary school?”

“Uh, no. You probably learned that in loser school for total babies, going into the water when there’s lighting is the most romantic thing I could ever imagine. Risk taking gets the blood pumping, ya know.”

“Oh, I know,” you say, and waggle your eyebrows at her. To your surprise, she blushes. Aww! You didn’t expect that. She might act all tough and dominating, but your dream girl is probably just a huge nerd.

“Anyway,” she says. “What kind of swimsuit do you want? I can dredge up whatever you want to wear.”

You shrug. You were never big on dressing yourself up, and besides, it’s always kind of fun when people pick stuff out for you. You aim to please. “Your choice! Wait, bad idea, anything but speedos.”

Vriska opens her mouth to suggest an item. You think of something else, and say, “Oh, and no banana hammocks, either.”

“Dang! You’d look really hot in one too.” she says, earnestly. “Okay, how about this?”

It’s a little tight, black and blue spandex down to your knees in the style of professional swimmers. You probably look pretty dumb with this thing on, since you have no muscles to speak of minus some insanely dexterous fingers. But, whatever, it’s not like anybody’s looking. Just you and your head.

Vriska beckons you with a flap of her hand, and you follow her to the edge of the shallow rock peninsula. Without checking to see if you’re following, she thrusts her arms out, bends her knees, and dives into the stormy sea. You wait a few seconds for her to swim out of the way, since you don’t want to collide with her in a comical underwater smacking of bodies, then cannonball right in.

You figure since it’s a dream, you can breathe underwater, like in every movie you’ve ever seen with an underwater dream sequence. You’re right, but that doesn’t make it any less disconcerting when fluid snorts up your nose and somehow translates itself into oxygen. If this were real life, your nostrils would be inflamed for days.

The water is incredibly clear. Artificially clear, like how early video games used to render water. There’s a little bit of murky texture, but not enough to make it a hindrance. It’s not even foggy because of dirt or anything, just because it’s getting dark outside and the light doesn’t pierce too brightly through the surface.

But it’s enough. Orange beams flicker through the billowing sea canopy, hitting the sand deep beneath you, illuminating a spooky sunken pirate ship. Vriska treads water, her hair floating in great blades around her like a dark halo. She grins. Tiny bubbles pop out from between her teeth.

“See? Much better than a shitty soda fountain.”

Her voice is crystal clear, like you were standing in quiet, crisp air. It’s a nice contrast with how warm and pressed up you feel under the ocean. “I dunno, I could be having the best dream milkshakes in the history of time right about now…”

“Oh, stuff it.” She grabs your wrist, dolphin kicks out, and you begin to swim to the shipwreck.

You don’t want to make the whole trip in silence, so you decide to learn more about your dream girl. Your head has got to have thought up some backstory for her by now, right? “So, Vriska… Who were you before you totally and believably and in no way a figment of my imagination-ly got stuck in my skull?”

She snickers, not turning her head back to look at you. “Me? I’m a total goddess! Before isn’t the issue, I’m the best right here, right now. You should be bowing at my feet and worshiping me! But I’m super nice and empathetic, so instead, I’m taking you on a date.”

You laugh. Vriska’s funny! She takes a sharp left dive towards the middle of the ship, and you duck your head to avoid her hair punching you in the face. “No, seriously, who are you supposed to be? Some kind of representation of my psyche? Like, mommy issues or something? Wait, no, I don’t have any of those, that’s Dave. You’re probably just a normal character. What’s your backstory? Maybe… uh, something to do with that creepy mirror? You were Karkat’s ex girlfriend? It was your most precious possession? Or wait, super spooky idea: maybe you are a ghost who got trapped in the mirror?”

“Ding ding! You won! It’s the last one,” she says, pulling you down to the crows nest of the ship. “Although it wasn’t so much ‘trapped’ as a backup plan for when things went shitways. And it worked, because I found you!”

Your feet hit solid, slimy wood, and you lean back on the rails of the crows nest as best as you can underwater. “Oh, really? You’re a ghost? I should get an exorcist then, I know like seven of them.”

“Wouldn’t work! I’m way too powerful.” She leans back too, trying to look as chill as you. Which is hard, because you’re the chillest dude you know.

“How’d you die?”

She purses her lips to the side, smacks them twice in a slew of bubbles. She looks kind of pissed off that you brought up the question. She floats her legs up, then pushes off the rail, doing an underwater backflip towards the galley.

You follow, kicking gently after her. She might have a head start, but you’ve got a pretty large leg span and a whole lot of gusto. You catch up to her, then elbow her in the shoulder. “Aw, c’mon, tell me!”

“Fine, brown-noser Nosebert. I tried to pull a coup d'état in my friend group,” she says, grimacing. “And it totally would have worked too, but I was betrayed. Stabbed right in the back by my BFF! It was super unfair!”

“Uh, your friend group murdered you because you wanted to be in charge of your playdates? Your friends sound weird.”

“Yeah, I was too good for them.” You both slap your palms against the deck of the ship, then push up so you’re both treading water above the wood. “Way way way too good. And I was trying to do them a favor, too! The ‘leader’ of our little group was a pretty evil guy, you know. I’m talking bottom of the barrel, burns down orphan factories, kicks puppies kind of evil. Killed a whole lot of people. I mean, I’ve killed a whole lot of people too I guess. But they all deserved it! The lives our so called ‘fearless leader’ took were just innocent nobodies.”

You have no idea what she’s talking about, and wonder what this all says about your psyche. You’re really reconsidering therapy at this point. But you listen anyway, because apparently you’ve opened the backstory floodgates and Vriska isn’t going to close them anytime soon. You follow her down through a hole in the galley, swimming into the tail of a fading golden sunbeam.

“So, I wanted to be the leader of our little friendgroup, right? I was way more qualified at it and just generally a better and nicer person all around and probably would have been a good change for everybody! And I got all my pals on my side too, I even got the asshole wildcard guy who was pushing my BFF around when I wasn’t looking. But noooooooo, as soon as I go to ‘convince’ our dear leader to become aware of his incompetency and ill-thought-out methods and step down for the good of the whole, I get stabbed by my bestie.”

You both land on the sand, the wooden bottom of the boat long dissolved into the bottom of the sea. You float in dim sunlight, particles blinking around you both. “Why’d she do that?”

She shrugs. “She was in love with the guy. She didn’t want me to do anything to him. Her loss.”

She immediately heads for a scraggly, spooky looking treasure chest near the side of the big ship. Her feet leave oozing, wavy prints in the sand as she slow-walk-swims to it.

“Okay, uh, that was an interesting story,” you say. “I think. I mean, your friends sound weird and violent and controlling, like Heathers or Mean Girls times eight thousand, but I realize this is a dream which operates on dream logic and am therefore taking this with a huge grain of salt.”

Vriska stops opening the chest to turn and look offended. “My story is serious business! Jeez, that took a lot out of me to tell you that.”

“Ha ha, okay, dream girl, who is from my own head,” you say. “But anyway, I don’t know, I don’t think your BFFsie was completely unjustified in stabbing you, considering murder seems to be an aok response to mundane situations with your friends.”

She puts her hands on her hips, an action which takes exactly five seconds longer than it should due to the weight of the water. “She was utterly unjustified! She killed me because I wanted to make things better for everybody! So what if I wanted to kill her lover, he was kind of an asshole.”

You run your fingers through your hair, which feels heavy and thick. You are about to lay down some harsh truths on this girl! “See, like, that’s the problem. You’re not looking past yourself? Maybe your friend really really loved that guy! And maybe you wouldn’t listen because you hated him? So I’m not saying that it was the right choice to kill you, but maybe she felt stressed and pressured and wasn’t able to handle it and thought she found the best option out.”

Vriska narrows her eyes, searching you for something, before pushing her hovering hair back behind her shoulders and turning to the chest. “Whatever. Joke’s on her,” she says, quietly. “Because I managed to save a piece of myself.”

She breaks off a rotten board from the top, throws it to the side, and jams her hand through the hole. You hear some clicking noises, all mugged up from the ocean, then a snap, and she pops open the trunk. You drift over to her, avoiding the burst of her long hair, and peer over her shoulder. The chest is filled to the brim with gorgeous coins and pearls that glint and shimmer in the underwater light. Makes you want to dive comically into them like Scrooge McDuck.

“Cool.” you say.

“You like pretty shiny things, huh?” she says, grinning. “Me too.”

“You say that like I’m a bird or something. Like I’m going to drag it away to my crow babies.”

She pushes her hand into the pile of pirate treasure, up to her wrist, and hefts out a big handful of jewelry. A few coins slip out, sink back down into the pile with a soft ‘clink.’ It’s a pleasing noise.

“If I were alive…” she says. “I could do this every day. Not just in your head.”

“Huh?”

She looks at you in the way your dad used to when you were little and he had to make you do something you didn’t want to. You don’t get to find out what she’s looking at you like that for, because you wake up to the jarring buzz of your alarm.

*********

You think about your dream girl all the next day. She’s funny and mysterious, and you like both of those things. She’s like a good plot, or a good antihero, and you can’t help but be fascinated with what your head thought up for you. If you were the creative type… gosh, she would be a fun character to write about.

You’re not doing any performances or Mass, so all your daydreaming about her distracts you from your paperwork and concert practice. So it’s not much of a surprise when you dream of her yet again that night, because you tend to dream about the things you are obsessed with, right?

Who said you were obsessed?

You wind up in the same exact place as the night before, setting sun hidden behind a growing storm on the coast. You fold your arms and huff at normal-sized, swimsuited Vriska standing near you on the rocks. “C’mon, Vriska. You can’t take a guy to the same hip date spot twice in a row. That’s no way to woo someone.”

She puts her hands on her waist. “It was just fine yesterday! Why not today!”

“Because I need variety in my life,” you say. Maybe you should pick the date spot today? It’s your head, right? You should be able to control it. “Hey, I think I’ve got a pretty good kind-of pirate themed place we can try out, if you want.”

“Sure, I guess. It’d better be really romantic!”

“Of course!”

You close your eyes, and think of the scene: a pretty beach cove you once saw in a calendar for the month of August. It’s a cozy little bay area, just big enough for a medium sized boat to fit in. The sand curves around in a crescent moon shape, high rocky cliffs boxing the whole space off from the rest of the world. Leaves and other greenery growing from the walls dangle down and flit in the ocean wind. There are two beach chairs, some fishing poles, and a big umbrella set up in the middle of the curved dune, soaking up the warm sun.

You open your eyes, and you’re there. Vriska looks around, at first judgmental, but her gaze shifts to something approving once the warm wind ruffles her hair.

You think it’d be funny to flirt with her. It’s not like you can lead somebody on who isn’t real, right? You pull out a beach chair for Vriska, bow a little, and give your suavest, sexiest eyebrow waggle.

“Hey, Vriska,” you say. “Have you ever been fishing?”

This gesture makes Vriska blush. You start laughing as she stammers out a “No.”

You pick up a fishing pole and hand it to her. She holds it like she was picking up a live snake. “Really? I’ll teach you.”

“Why? I can just dig around in your head and learn from that. It’s way more efficient.”

“Yeah, but it’s not fun. Here, come stand by me.”

She tiptoes over to you like you’re going to lash out and bite her or something, and you duck behind her. You hold her hands, angle her arms up so she’s holding the pole right. You feel her burning, which is super cute. You teach her how to cast and reel it in like that, giving her little tips as you super suave-ly lean over her shoulder, until she elbows you in the stomach with a very embarrassed, “I got it already!”

You back off her, your goal of totally messing with her complete. You sit down in your beach chair, pick up the pole, and cast it. You’re not sure if you can even catch dream fish, and you don’t really want to. The fun part of fishing is the company you spend it with, and the ocean breeze on your face.

You sit in comfortable silence, or at least you’re comfortable. Vriska looks incredibly pissed off at her fishing rod, and you get a kick out of watching her trying to find a comfortable way to hold it. You don’t think fishing is really her thing.

“This is the best,” you say. “I think I needed this relaxing vacay to a tropical island after all the stress from my upcoming concert.”

“Right, yeah, that thing,” says Vriska, recasting her line. “What’s that supposed to be about, anyway? I looked in your head but it was all in German and languages aren’t really my specialty.”

“Oh, I’m playing The Book with Seven Seals, sort of,” you say, thinking about how to explain it. “The Book with Seven Seals is originally this really classic piece for organ, choir, and orchestra. But I’m playing a reinterpretation of it! I guess the Catholic church wanted to do something not-boring for once? Anyway, it has a heck of a lot more organ, a heck of a lot more complex forms, and is generally all around more exciting to listen to. It’s going to draw a huge, huge crowd.”

Vriska groans. “Yeah, but what’s it about? What’s the meaning of it all? What’s the plot? It’s got to have a plot, right?”

“Er, right,” you don’t really pay attention to the plot part of it. German is also not really your thing. “It’s about Revelations, the last book in the Bible. Saint John, who’s this crazy dude in a cave, is telling us about all the wacky shit he’s seeing about the end of the world. Like, there’s a bunch of evil horseman and the Antichrist and twelve titted whore ladies on dragons, and it’s all represented in song and stuff. It’s pretty much about the end of the world.”

“Wow, that’s really appropriate and poetic,” she says, and you’re not sure what she means by that. “Saint John, huh? Did they pick you to play it for the name alone?”

“Oh, no, they picked me because I’m pretty okay at organ playing. And I put on a show, I guess. I get told I tend to move with the music. I’ll be put front and center, too. I’ll show you the cathedral tomorrow night, it’s a pretty cool setup.”

“I’d… uh, like that,” she says. “You’d better remember it! You’re about to wake up again.”

Aw, too bad. That one seemed a little shorter than last night, but it’s not like you won’t see her again, right? You turn to her, observe her in the chair, wearing Rose’s swimsuit and hideous wireframe glasses and holding a fishing pole like she’s having an awkward middle school dance with it. She’s just asking to be made fun of, so you say,

“See ya tomorrow night, girl of my dreams.”

Vriska blushes head to toe, even her shoulders flushing in the morning sunlight peeking through the ocean cove, and blurts out a very loud, “Bye!” before your eyes snap open and you’re alone in your bed.

*********

On your third dream date, you take her to church.

You apparate in the middle of the cathedral, where you’ll be playing. The main place of worship is this massive four-winged masterpiece of architecture, pews upon pews lining the halls and facing the circular altar space in the center. The columns are square and white, branching up towards the golden, art nouveau patterned ceiling in a way that always gives you vertigo when you look at it too long. The gargantuan pipes of your organ line one of the walls of the wings, terrifying silver bellows lined with some seriously sick woodwork. The other walls have beautiful, turn of the century stained glass, which the late-afternoon light is currently dancing against.

The organ console is portable, and for your upcoming concert gets slapped smack dab in the middle of the four wings of the church, your back to the grand pipes. It’s angled so that every section of the audience can watch you play on a raised platform, which is a combination of nerve-wracking and exciting! You’ll even be in front of the orchestra and choir too, right next to the conductor. You lean over the side of the console, and poke Vriska.

“I can see you don’t dress up for church.” you say, eyeing up her army jacket/green slime ghost shirt combo.

She shrugs. “I’m too cool for that. So this is what constitutes a place of worship nowadays?”

“Yeah, I pretty much live here,” you say. “I know this church like the back of my hand.”

She hops off the organ platform, and begins to wander down one of the long wings. “Excellent. It’ll make a great base of operations once our plans succeed.”

You follow her down the aisle, trailing a little behind her. “And what plans are those?”

“The plan of: Vriska comes back and gets unstuck from John Egbert’s head.” She spins around, waving her hand dismissively. “It’s pretty complicated though, and you’re totally the type who gets bored of stuff easily so why even bother going over it? I feel like you’d just kind of ruin it anyways.”

Shot to the heart. “Ouch, I take offense to that!”

“Well, okay, I guess you’re not tooooooootally a flighty loser, you’re actually pretty smart and capable and have a potential for great power in you. Which is why I’m here. Because you’re going to win for me. You’re going to win back life for me.”

“Okay, I guess?” You follow her into one of the rows of pews, as she picks up one of the songbooks and begins to leaf through it. “That’s cool though, how I’ve got great power. Tell me more!”

She sets the songbook back down on the bench. “Well, you’re really good at music, and while your personality isn’t necessary strong or anything, it’s pretty genuine. I like that! I like-”

She turns to you then, and you come to the realization you’re standing quite close to her.

Her eyes, with their barely-there white irises, are open wide in surprise and embarrassment. A slight blush works its way across her silky smooth cheeks. You like how cute she gets when you fluster her, when you put the moves on her or just generally impress her with your height and/or sweet pranks. It’s fun, especially since how this is a dream, and you can pretty much do whatever you want with her. Hey, yeah, you’re an unstoppable force of romance, aren’t you? You can do whatever you want.

The lights dim, an orange sunset peeks just perfectly through the stained glass windows, casting little shimmering disco-ball shadows all over the floor of the church. They move across Vriska’s cheek, settle into her thick hair, make her shine like diamonds. You reach to her face, push her glasses up with one hand as you brush your thumb along her jawline with the other. She looks up at you in total, unblinking awe.

Watching all those romance movies really paid off for you, huh? You’re such a lady-killer.

It’s odd, your heart is hammering like you’re awake. Like you’re dancing with your date at high school prom, about to kiss her for the very first time. This kind of draw… This isn’t something you can dream up, is it?

Your thoughts are interrupted by Vriska puckering her lips tight, slamming her eyes shut, and standing up against you on tiptoes as high as she can muster. She looks really funny— you can’t help but chuckle as you bend to meet her midway.

She hits you full-force, and for two terrible seconds all that first-kiss giddiness is replaced by ‘wow she really sucks at this’ but comes back in a whoosh of butterflies once Vriska relaxes. In fact, her smooching skills exponentially improve the more you go at it, even though all you’re doing is a lot of light lip presses with a bit of tongue here and there. Nice.

Vriska loops her whole arm around the back of your head, pushes you in, and a bit of tongue turns into a hell of a lot of inappropriate-in-church tongue in the blink of an eye. You let her, because you like the feel of her piercings. They’re cool and slick and not really like anything you’ve felt in your mouth before. They’re fun to play around with.

You feel her eyelashes flutter against your cheek, and she pulls away with a ridiculous suction release noise. “Dammit, John, you’re about to wake up! How could you?”

She’s blushing and her legs are trembling and wow, she’s adorable, you just want to smoosh her cheeks together and kiss her face. She’d probably get mad at you for that, ha ha. “I guess I got a little excited! Whoo boy, my heart is pounding. But that means we’ll just have more time together tomorrow night, right?”

“I guess.” She frowns, then presses her palms against your shoulders. “Hey, isn’t tomorrow when Jade and the-”

You wake up.

Disappointment hits you as you stare up at your blurry, still dark popcorn ceiling. Partly because you just had to kiss-block yourself by opening your eyes, and partly because your dream girl is just that… a dream. You can’t develop a romance with your imaginary friend, that would be weird. Really, really weird.

Maybe after a few more nights of this, you’ll try to dream of something else.

Chapter Text

Jade and Karkat arrive bright and early, eight AM on the dot.

You open the door to your sweet, precious sister, grinning so wide her eyes are barely open. She jumps into your arms with a loud, “John!!!” and proceeds to pick you up and swing you around in the most awesome sibling hug of all time. Gosh, you haven’t seen her since Christmas, it feels nice to hold her/get held by her swole-ass muscles.

She finally sets you back down, you sibling-high-five, and then you open the door a little wider to let her in. Jade skips into your house like she owns the place, while Karkat (oh, right, you forgot he was there), hangs back in the apartment hallway, folding his arms and looking like a ruffled Pomeranian.

“You can come in too,” you say. “Although you might be the third wheel on our sweet two month-long sibling date, sorry.”

“Well, that’s fucking disgusting,” he says, hefting up some small suitcases. “Keep your incestuous shenanigans out of this happy sanctuary while I’m here, please and thank you.”

That joke went right over his head. You can’t help but laugh. Karkat’s abrasive at best, gross and rude at worst, and hilarious constantly. You like him, but in all the wrong ways. You’ll have to ask Jade why she’s keeping him around.

He looks so small when he’s not standing next to you, like he’s this malnourished little thing drowning in an ugly black tshirt that says “NADER 2004.” But when he walks past you through the doorframe, he’s suddenly this dominating, six foot four, tribal-tattooed and overly threatening Mexican punk with super freaky ear gauges.

You think it’s a posture thing. He slouches when he’s not walking, because when he walks, he strides. Like he’s imagining himself wearing a kingly cape.

You watch him from the doorframe. Jade catches his shoulder, tiptoes up to his ear, and whispers something to him. His face visibly softens, like, whoa, you had no idea he was even capable of anything that wasn’t a craggy old-man scowl. He swings the suitcases around, and carts them presumably to your spare bedroom as per Jade’s instructions. Insert sound of whip cracking.

You walk up to Jade and whisper, “Hey, don’t take this the wrong way, but why do you even like him?”

Her eyes open wide. “You don’t like him?”

“Well, sort of, yeah I do, but not important! I want to know what you see in him!”

“Oh, easy. He’s actually pretty nice under all that gruff, and he’s funny and good with words, and he’s cute, and he’s… really good with words… and cute, and… he’s really good at… um, I mean, really good at…”

Jade looks away, bites her lip, flushes pink, and starts twirling her hair.

Your sister. Your sister who hasn’t been embarrassed about anything since she was fifteen and thought ‘knotting’ meant two furries getting married, is blushing. With anybody else, it’d be pretty clear what they were ‘wink-wink-nudge-nudge’-ing towards, but with Jade doing it it’s kind of like getting slapped in the face with erotic memorabilia.

“Oh my god,” you say. “Jade, you’re a slave to the sins of the flesh, aren’t you?”

She sighs, desperately. “I am… such a slave. Oh my god, John, how did I become this?”

“I don’t know! We have the same genes!”

She grips at your shoulders. “You are so lucky you never wanna do it. I waste so much time on sexy stuff, jeez.”

Karkat strides back into your living room, so you don’t have time to berate her for that dumb comment. Instead you say, “Yeah, okay, suuuuuuuure.”

Karkat looks at you funny when that last syllable leaves your mouth, but he doesn’t bring up whatever bothered him. He waves the two tickets you put in the spare bedroom for safekeeping. “Are these for your concert?”

“Um, be careful with those,” you say. “They’re like two thousand dollars.”

Jade stares at them, then at you. “… Are they?”

“Not really, but they’re pretty expensive! I’m a popular guy.”

“Great,” says Karkat. “Let’s scalp ‘em and be done with this drivel, I hate classical music. My hate for boring symphonies could power a hydroelectric dam, it’s so strong.”

Jade ignores him. “Why are they so expensive? I mean, I know you’re awesome, but…”

“There’s a really good American choral group doing the operatic parts, Saint something-or-other Choir, and the Berlin Philharmonic too. And boy, can those guys draw a crowd. The tickets were all sold out like, immediately.”

“Berlin?” asks Karkat. Oh jeez, does he really not know where Berlin is?

“You know, ‘wunderbar.’” you say. “Das deuschland.”

This reply, for some reason, infuriates Karkat. He gets fire-engine red, his hands clench into fists, and you start laughing when he says, “That grammar, that pronunciation, that wording choice, is *so* wrong, *so* blazingly backwards, *so* decrepit, you deserve to be banished into a pit where bad poetry is forced into your hearholes for centuries until your brain bleeds out from the combined pileup of grotesque syllables!”

“Did you do that to people?” says Jade, offended. Uh, no Jade, he didn’t. It was clearly just a weird outburst.

“Isn’t that the beginning of the Hitchhikers Guide?” you say. “The movie, not the book.”

Karkat folds his arms, calming down considerably. “Oh, huh, yeah. I guess it is.”

You’ve got to hike it to church so you give them a spare key and some more hugs (not Karkat though, Karkat gets a fist bump he finally returns after five minutes of nagging). You suggest they come with you to listen to you practice and check out the cathedral, but Jade apparently made breakfast plans and Karkat looks uncomfortable with that idea, so you go on your merry way without them.

Today you’re practicing your piece with the choral group. The orchestra is on tour and won’t be here to play with for a few more days. As per usual, you don’t miss a note, you keep tempo excellently, and you get your head buried and lost in the joy of music. You think the dry run through The Book with Seven Seals goes perfectly, until you get feedback from the organ director.

“You’re drowning the choir out, sweet thing,” she says. “Tone back your windy notes, and you will do fine.”

The choir director agrees. You re-rehearse certain sections of the piece, try to get the balance between voice and your pipes nailed down. You think you get it. Maybe. It’s just so hard to keep a certain tone! You tend to play without thinking, and you have to think a heck of a lot about volume and timbre to match the choir, which you think detracts from the overall effect.

Afterwards, the organ director pulls you aside and tells you your performance was “fine,” but you still need more oomph. More bellows. She says it’s better, but not perfect.

Fuck. You’ve really got to improve at this. You’re getting desperate.

When you come back from your job, your sis and Karkat aren’t home. They’re probably out and about, enjoying Seattle! It gives you time for more practice, so you don’t mind too much. They eventually return post-dinnertime, and you play cards with them for three hours. You find out that Karkat sucks literal balls at games of chance, while you do better than usual. You guess it’s just a lucky day for you!!!!!!!!

When you crawl into bed, it takes you too long to get to sleep.

You’re excited to see her again.

*********

This all looks familiar.

You’ve returned to your weird, ancient Mexican-y dreamscape, strong zig-zag lines etched into the walls and pillows stuffed with real feathers propping you up. Vriska, thankfully normal and wearing clothing this time, stands above you. Her hands are on her hips, and she’s trembling a little. Is she nervous?

“John,” she says. “It’s um… uh… so rude that you’re taking up the pillow space, I can’t believe you didn’t leave any room for me! I never expected you to be so dismissive of my needs!”

D’aww. You can’t believe you charmed this weirdly shy dream girl. You pat your thighs and say, “Well, I’m not moving.”

She takes the hint, turns, and plops her butt right between your legs, sitting on you sidesaddle. You drape your arms around her waist and she wraps hers behind your shoulders and it’s all really nice and cozy. She smells good and rich, like the smell you get when you’re melting down deep dark chocolate. Wow, that’s a weird thought, you should probably stop smelling dream girls.

She won’t make eye contact with you, she’s so embarrassed. She grabs her wrist behind your neck to stop herself from shaking. Hot damn, you’re so going to mess with her. You’re turning the charm up to eleven and burning this place down.

You gently press your fingers against her chin, lift her gaze so her eyes wide and surprised meet yours. You tuck a strand of hair behind her ear and she basically melts. The corners of her mouth turn up in a swoon-filled, genuine smile, and her head lolls back a bit from the warm crush fuzzies you’re probably giving her. You are the master of romance tropes, it is you.

“Vriska, don’t worry, there’s no need to be nervous. You’re just a dream.”

Vriska snaps her head back to attention. “Goddammit! No! Ugh, whatever, we’ll talk about that later, what’s important now is that-” she slips her arm from your shoulder to poke you in the chest. “-we’re going to try having sex again.”

She doesn’t look nervous in the least. You can’t believe that propositioning somebody is easier for her than just giving them a hug. You can’t say you’re not a little offended. “Again? Vriska, the last time was just you trying to do some naked chicken dance in front of me while I was mentally scarred forever. And, heck no! No! I thought we had a nice thing going, but noooooooo, you couldn’t even wait another two dream dates for this, who tries to have sex on the fourth dream date with somebody Just Not Into It? I am so objectified right now. I can’t believe you were after my hot bod this whole time.”

You were half-joking with that last part, but Vriska furrows her brow, as though she was the one wronged. “John, please. You’re nothing special.”

“Way to make a guy feel loved.”

“I mean, I’m not just in it for your dick, which is average at best. I’ve still got my reasons, and those reasons are to give you some stuff I’m not really using right now. It’s imperative you get it. But also… I…” she shirks away again, folding her chin down to her chest. “-I maybe kind of like you, for some reason. I’d like you to uh… kuh-k-kis-” She snaps her head up in Vriska-rage. “-fuck the living daylights out of me!!!!!!!!”

Gosh, she’s an enigma. Although you like enigmas, it gives you something to do. Like watching a good TV show.

Vriska’s ‘I like you, so fuck me,’ suggestion gives you all sorts of feelings, most of which boil down to “meh.” People trying to show appreciation for each other with their genitalia always confused the bejeezus out of you, because the only thing that resulted from your attempts of trying it were long half-hours of total boredom and some very upset girls. “Are you okay? Are you really into me? Why aren’t you-?” Yeesh, that was a bad time.

But then again, this is a dream. With fake dream rules and lack of expectations for yourself. And you like your weird dream vision girl enough to be blatantly honest with her about what you can and can’t do. Maybe dreamsex involves some freaky weird mind sex like the plant aliens in Farscape. Now that’s something you can get behind.

You give Vriska a soft pat on the back. “Okay, even if I do agree-”

Her eyes light up.

“-then we get to problemo numero dos-o, which is how are you going to, uh-” you pause to break out the air quotes. “’Keep me entertained.’ I mean, I am assuming you’re going to want to stick things in parts, which is kind of a hard thing to do when there aren’t… hard things to put in places!”

“Wow, that was the worst roundabout innuendo I’ve ever heard in my life,” she says. “But don’t worry about that part! It was a challenge, but I overcame it! I did research, so much research, all the research. I researched long and I researched hard and you’ll soon be pounded with allllllll the fruits of my labor.”

“Are you sure my innuendo was the worst one you’ve ever heard? Because that was pretty awful.”

She ignores you, shifting in your lap so she’s on her knees and straddling your hips. You don’t know what to do with your hands so you rest them on the pillows. She wiggles her fingers at you, like you would do if you were practicing one of those ‘appearify the cards’ magic tricks, and a large needle pops out between her thumb and forefinger. It’s long, thick, shiny, and hollow, and a terrible horror rises in you as you stare at it.

You can’t tear your eyes away from the needle. It glints threateningly in the light. As threateningly as an inanimate object can glint, anyway. “Uh, Vriska, you’re not… going to stab me in the dick with that, are you?”

She shrugs. “Don’t worry, I won’t. Not yet, anyways.”

“… yet?” you choke out. “I’m regretting this.”

“Oh, pfft, you can handle it, you big strong manly man, you. I’m not even going to do anything that bad! Just a few pokes here and there, in pre-approved places.” She rubs the needle between her fingers, eyeing it up like a piece of steak. “You see, I’ve dug around in your head a while and… you’ve got an auto-pain response. A sexy sexy sex auto-pain response.”

Images of you being PVC’d and whipped like that basement guy in Pulp Fiction flood your head, and oh god oh god that is a dark mind trip you do NOT want to go down. You press your hands against your cheeks in a panic. “Oh no, no no no, no, Vriska, Vriska. Vriska. Do not tell me with your freaky accurate dream analysis powers that I am a sadomasochist and into getting poked in the dick with needles, ah ha ha, do not poke me in the dick, I- can we stop talking about this?”

“Did I say you were into into it? No. You’re not actually, mentally aroused by anything in the traditional sense. I would know, I looked really hard!” She laughs then, long and full. “I just said you had a response. Like getting kicked in the knee. But with more booooooooners.”

You draw air through your teeth, watching Vriska twirl the needle between her fingers. Imagining that sinking into your skin is… “I’m not going to do this if I’m not into it.”

“Duh! I already thought of that. You’re soooooooo going to like it, you just have to remember that this isn’t real life. You won’t be changed at all when you wake up.”

You grip the pillows underneath you. “What?”

She holds up the needle, as well as a large gold disc in her other hand, about the size of the bottom of a soda can. She flits it between her fingers— it’s thick and shiny, with a hook on the end of it.

“I’m just going to pierce your ears!”

“Oh, ha ha, why didn’t you say that in the first place? That’s… fine, I think. If a bit girly.”

Well, okay, if you get a boner from getting your ears pierced it is probably an excellent thing you never ever ever want to do that in real life. Although you’re wondering how one little shot of probably minor pain manages to maintain the goshdarn thing. You would think it’d be like stab->ouch->boner->deflate in rapid succession, but what do you know?

She leans in, her breath on your cheek. The disc vanishes to free her hand up, and her fingers brush around your earlobe. She licks her bottom lip. “Don’t worry, John. I am the very best at this.”

“At piercing ears, or-”

You stop talking, because she does it. Just a quick poke, in and out, and it just feels like you’re getting a shot at the doctors. The large earring flips back into existence, and you feel its weight hang heavy on you when Vriska inserts it. It hurts— kind of this lingering, dull throb of pain. You shift under her. Definitely nothing.

“Uh, I don’t think it worked,” you say.

“I’m just getting started! I’m taking your shirt off, by the way.”

She glides her fingers through your hair, pushes you backwards so you’re flush against a pile of soft, rich pillows that feel smooth and good on your back. Wow, that was slick, your shirt is just gone.

“You’ve got to look the best if you’re going to be mine, you know,” she purrs. You’d make fun of her for that… but you maybe sort of kind of like what she said. It makes a whole bunch of shivers shoot down your spine, like somebody just started giving you a massage. Are you into- nope, not going there, not going to think about it. “You’re going to be beautiful, John. You’ll be worthy. You’re going to shine with my gold.”

“Okay, that’s cool,” you say. It comes out cracked and high-pitched.

She sits up straight, grins, and spreads her arms out. Coins fall from her hands, a river of gold rushing from her wrists and clattering to the floor with a pleasing series of ‘clink’s. She stops the flow, flicks out another heavy disc earring. She leans in. “Isn’t this pretty? And it’s all going to be for you. Doing okay there, buddy?”

Oh, she’s totally messing with you. Not fair. “Yeah, ha ha, fine. Totally fine! Peachy!”

“Glad you’re still down! I knew I liked you.” She drags her hand down your cheek, then tugs on your unpierced earlobe. “You’ll look so divine when I’m done.”

She doesn’t use the needle this time, you’re not sure where it went. Instead, she presses her thumb and pointer finger against your skin, and you feel the weird light pain of getting a hole put in you. She puts the other earring in, and it slides in easy as anything. She leans back, and a mirror appears between her hands.

“See how good I made you look? Those are solid gold, with dark aquamarine edging,” she says, pride in her voice. “They’re in my colors. You’re so handsome, you look so perfect with those. The best, even.”

You do look good. The two earrings frame your face and transform your appearance into some hot androgynous supermodel. You feel heavy, the weight of the earrings helping this odd, dull throb edge through your head. You hurt like you got bruised, but you’re feeling tingly all over from viewing your reflection.

Oh goddammit, you’ve got a thing for playing dressup, don’t you? It’s not even sexual, that would be way too normal. It’s just a weird personal attention-combo-grooming thing that you happen to like in the most bizarre way EVER and ha ha you are not going to examine this train of thought any further! Just sit back and don’t think about it. Don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about it-

She sets the mirror down, and picks up your hand. She presses her palms against yours, then pushes down your arm, like molding clay. The heavy clink of jewelry tugs down on your fingers and wrists, and your arm is suddenly this dolled up disco ball of gold and blue bracelets and rings. You can’t hold back a gasp that Dave would make fun of for years if he heard— you feel damn good about yourself in expensive jewelry. It’s so real, too. Everything is. The pain from your ears, your heart throbbing when you look into her wide white eyes, the rattling of the bracelets as Vriska sets your arm down-

“Wait,” you say, your voice coming out as a strangled whisper. “This is real. This is too real. This is really, really happening.”

“No shit,” says Vriska. She leans in then, her breath on your lips. “You want a piercing in there? I know how nice you thought mine felt.”

You should be horrified. This should be crushing you right now. You should think up a vacuum and suck her actually a ghost ass up into the bag and never get haunted by her again. But instead of all those logical emotions, you feel relief. Relief that you're not doing this with your own head, that you're not exploring your wacko non-sexual preferences with some bizarre imaginary friend in a sexual way. But then again, Vriska dug through your head! If she's real, then that means she really invaded a lot of boundaries, really-

Vriska taps on your lips, impatiently. You are a weak and impressionable human meatsack and you can’t believe you actually open your dang mouth for her.

She kisses you deep. You feel the cool press of metal, then a godawful lightning bolt of pain, and you’ve got this ball at the tip of your tongue. And that one really hurts, like, got stung by a whole hive of bees in your mouth hurt, and your hands start to twitch against Vriska’s thighs.

“Owwh, owh, owh owh owh-”

“Shhhhhh,” she says, kissing you again. She’s not careful about it either, and you wince and taste blood and your ears start to hammer with the throb of pain setting in. She puts her hand around your neck, and something thick and cold cinches itself around your skin.

Jesus tapdancing Christ, she just put a collar on you.

She backs off, admiring you. That look of ‘I’d buy you from a pet store’ makes the back of your skull light up with a static-y sensation. Also shame. You also light up with shame (but you also, secretly, kind of enjoy that too). “That’s all my gold as well,” she says. “It’s made especially to fit you, babe. Nice and tight and mine.”

You can’t help but laugh at that bad porn line. It comes out quiet. You feel… good? You’re having… fun? Something like that.

If you were previously aware of the song and dance routine apparently required to 100% guarantee you a boner, you would definitely not have agreed to this. But right now, it’s oh-so-nice, all these new feelings, pain just on the tip of this relaxing pulsing pleasure, and Vriska looks like she’s enjoying it too. She’s warm, her eyes narrowed at you, breathing loud and vocal. Her free hand trails to your waistband, then lower, checking for how you’re reacting in a way that isn’t unpleasant at all.

“John,” she whispers, and her voice is heavy. “I’m going to- I mean, can I-”

“Yeah,” you say, with difficulty. She undoes your belt. “Just don’t stop whatever you’re doing.”

She doesn’t.

*********

When your alarm eventually wakes you up in the jarring sensation of getting tugged away from the arms of someone you just connected with, you notice three things: 1. No pain. 2. No holes 3. You really need to change your boxers.

You drift out of bed, beelining it towards your dresser. You stretch yourself out, rolling your shoulders to try to get your muscles up and working again. You yawn, pull out a fresh pair of ineffably awesome slime boxers, and use the old pair to… uh… mop up. You slip the new pair on, and stretch out again, flexing your calves and arms as far as you can go. And when you don’t feel the floor underneath you, you notice something else.

4. Your feet haven’t touched the ground since you’ve got out of bed.

“Holy hell!” you scream, and that throws you off balance and you somersault in midair. The gravity does things to your head and you’re struggling around while flying and yelling, “Holy shit! What!? Holy shit!”

Your flailing careens you into the wall, and you faceplant into it with a slam that rocks the whole apartment building. You slowly, slowly, slide down against it, until your torso hits the floor with a very soft thud. You feel all shellshocked, and plan on staying planked against the ground for an indefinite period of time, but your plans are interrupted by your door opening.

“Alright, I’d like for you to list every reason out for me, slowly, and with feeling, why the *fuck* you decided to throw yourself a wall-slamming screamo party at unnatural hours of the morning!”

You roll onto your back, not trusting your feet, and stare up at Karkat. His face softens when he looks down at you. “Hey, Egbert, you okay? You look pallid. Did something happen?”

You open your mouth to tell him. But then you remember what Vriska said. What Vriska, a real ghost, a real ghost who is actually trapped in your head, said to you. And right now, with your brain buzzing with memories of how close you felt to her, you’d trust her over Karkat any day.

Don’t tell him.

“Sorry,” you say. “I sleepwalk sometimes.”

He narrows his eyes. “You’re lying.”

“Uh.” How does he know that? Your heart starts racing. Okay, if he can tell when you’re lying, then you just have to tell the truth, right? “I… uh, had an embarrassing yet weirdly fun dream?”

He raises an eyebrow, then says the word, “Gross,” very carefully, before yawning and walking straight out of your room.

You can’t help but be relieved. You don’t know why, since Karkat… Karkat’s just a goofball. He can’t hurt you. Why did Vriska warn you about him? You’ve got a lot of questions, but not a lot of answers. Maybe the best thing you can do is go to work, and try to concentrate until you can fall back asleep tonight.

That is, if you’re not floating away into the atmosphere by then. Your back begins to float off the ground by a few inches.

Unreal air, bruh.

Chapter Text

You manage to get ‘walking on the ground’ down pat after five minutes of pacing alone in your room.

The problem lies in staying there.

You don’t want to walk. You want to fly, you want to hover, you want to float around upside down and shoot off into the sky like a jet, leaving a trail of water vapor in the atmosphere behind you. But like, that would probably get the attention of secret government agencies or something and they would capture you and probe you and that would be the worst!

You say goodbye to Jade, and head to church early. You want to get this day over and done with ASAP to confer with Vriska. Maybe interrogate her a bit, shake her by the shoulders very lightly, and ask firmly but with stern conviction: “What the fuck.”

You arrive at church, the main worship area completely empty. All the early morning weekday services take place in the smaller side chapel due to low turnout. You set your bookbag down on a random pew, and walk up to the slight marble platform big enough to fit an orchestra. Sunbeams from the windows reflect in your glasses, bounce around the high ceilings that you oh-so want to join. Nobody’s here, so nobody will see you, right?

You look up, throw your arms back, and lift. You do it slowly, feeling the weight taken off you, the sun on your body, the lightness of your legs, the absence of being grounded. You close your eyes. You could probably lose yourself like this, if you weren’t careful. Never touching down again, feeling the wind through your hair…

You hear footsteps echo through the cathedral, and you set yourself down. It’s the organ director. She didn’t see you.

“Alright my dear, how will it sound today? Before I force you to complete some administrative work, let’s run through your second and third solos.”

You do. You’re a little rattled from last night’s and this morning’s events, but it doesn’t stop you from a perfect run through the main parts of the piece. Maybe it’s a bit dry, but eh, you win some you lose some.

The director applauds once you finish. “You’re getting better, and at a slow and steady, little-engine-that-could pace up the mountain of improvement, but there’s still more, John. More that you need, a bit of spice to get the song savory for the listener’s mouths. Other than that, you’re doing well, sweetie. I believe in you.”

The words ‘I believe in you’ echo inside you. Bounce around through your thoughts like it’s a song stuck in your head. Your soul swells, like the compliment was eight million times more important than just the offhanded comment it was. You come to the realization that she means this, actually means this, that she really believes in you.

And that comes with realization part two: the way you’re reacting to the praise is off-the-wall, completely not normal. It actually feels a bit like last night, the way Vriska’s compliments pleased you, although you don’t want to think about that because relating Vriska to your old lady organ director is freaky in a billion different ways.

So you just say, “Thanks.”

And at that moment, you see your voice play out before your eyes.

Well, okay, slap that onto the ‘new weird things about John’s body today’ list. You just saw the soundwaves from your voice hovering in the church. A brief flash of zig-zag appeared and disappeared in front of you, a line that mimicked how you said ‘thanks’ that looked like one of the things on a heartbeat monitor. It was a cool visual effect, like something that would be on an album cover, a neon line gif-ing out in a big cathedral.

Except holy crap did you just see that? Actually, really, see that? You knew your vision was bad, but not this bad. That was trippy. That was scary LSD kind of stuff.

And the even scarier part? You kind of knew what the rise and fall meant. Like, messing around in a music editor with your own recordings you learned “big peak means loud, tiny peak means quiet,” and that’s about it. But with that brief flash of electric blue line you could not only sense dynamic, you also knew the way the pitch wavered in your throat, in what key you spoke in, how you could take and bend the waves to make it sound different.

“Uh,” you say, for kicks, and the same burst of soundwave line flashes in your mind’s eye. The organ director does not react, so yeah, either going crazy or some wacko Vriska-related effect. “What paper work do you have for me?”

When she says, “Some residency forms,” you see her sound dance green in midair, and that freaks you out enough to talk as little as possible for the rest of the day. Through some unwanted experimentation, you find out that tiny background noises like shuffling papers or slamming books shut don’t trigger this bizarre lightshow, it’s just when something big and reverent makes a sound. Like your voice. Or an organ.

Jade and her boy toy aren’t home when you get back from work, so you just kind of float around the house while doing your chores. You imagine you’re an astronaut, swimming through air without even thinking, diving over your breakfast bar instead of walking around it, feeling like you’re at home with yourself for the first time in a long while. Besides, washing dishes is a bootfull of fun when you’re doing barrel rolls in the air.

When you’re done eating dinner, you settle at your practice organ. You hover above the bench, like you’re laying on your stomach. You won’t need the pedals for this.

You turn it on. You press middle C.

A line appears in front of your eyes. Wide and lengthy, lingering for as long as you hold down the key for. You can see the tone with your eyes, know exactly what the sound contains, the science behind the voice of your organ.

You press C#.

It’s more… backwards than C was. Like you’re looking at all these sounds in the middle of a four dimensional map. This flat line is set slightly behind, slightly higher.

You press D.

This one’s more to the left. You bet the next will be in front of it coordinates-wise.

You press D#.

You were right.

E.

Oh, this is easy, it’s like playing a game, guessing where all these soundwave notes rest in your weirdo synesthesia vision map.

F.

You’ll memorize these in no time.

F#.

Do you want to memorize them?

G.

You feel like you have to.

G#.

They’re yours now. Your sounds.

A.

You know the pattern by now, like you can guess where the next sound will appear. Like you can reach out and grab it and drag the line away and back, changing it into-

You hear a key in the lock. You set yourself down on the floor, carpet itchy on the balls of your feet.

Jade bursts into the apartment with her arms full of touristy postcards of bears and wolves and other furry stuff. “Oh my god, John! We had the best day ever! Let me go put these in our room and I’ll tell you all about it!”

Her voice is green like her name, little peaks flashing and disappearing as quickly as they came. You laugh at how ‘Jade’ her sound-lines are as she skips to her room. Karkat saunters in afterwards, looking pretty disheveled. Like, not handsomely disheveled, just sort of depressed-disheveled.

“Bet you guys went on a hot date, right?”

Karkat folds his arms. “We don’t go on dates.”

Karkat’s voice is unlike anything you’ve seen today. His line is grey, rises and falls at the same rate as everybody else’s chatterbox, but there’s something behind that. You narrow your eyes, wanting a closer inspection, even though the line’s already disappeared by now.

Karkat tilts his head. “What? What’s that incriminating look for?”

Yeah, there’s definitely something there. Bright, bright red, directly behind the grey line, almost inside of it. Does he have a dual tone thing going on? Do other people have this?

“Uh,” you say. “I was wondering why you don’t call them dates?”

He spreads his palms out towards you, shrugging with one shoulder. “Fuck if I know, better ask Miss ‘won’t hold hands even though we’re in the middle of a starlight park and it would be the most romantic moment of my pitiful life thus far if she did so.’ I’m sure she would give you a verbose answer.”

You’re a little distracted by his voice. No, he doesn’t have a dual tone thing going on.

He’s trying to cover something up.

Painting a sheet of gray over something deliciously bright. Pretty deliberately, too. You’ve got to ask Vriska how and why he’s doing that tonight, she’ll definitely know. You’d bet a shiny nickle on it.

(Also, you want to hear what that red sounds like. You bet it’s raw, gorgeous, a sound you could slurp up).

“Er, don’t feel so bad,” you say. “Jade just got out of a really, really long relationship with my bestie Dave. She probably doesn’t want to jump into anything too fast. And holding hands is like, level six on the relationship hierarchy. That’s a lot of hoops you’ve got to jump through.”

Karkat curls his lip. “I’d hate to know what the first five consist of. I mean, we’ve already fucked.”

Jade returns to the room, and you drop the conversation. You don’t talk much the rest of the night, preferring to listen to Jade and Karkat bicker and banter and laugh. Their sounds tangle and overlap, and although you can’t say you like them as a couple, they sure paint a pretty picture when they talk together. Karkat even shows a bit of his red for her, but you don’t quite catch what he’s saying with your ears, just your eyes.

(You get the sense it’s not meant for you.)

It’s hard to get to sleep that night. You’re jittery. You’re not sure if you’ll be as mad at Vriska as you initially thought you’d be, since you actually kind of like these weird new powers. But you want answers, you want things to be spread out for you clear as crystal, and that’s something you never really desire. She’s pushed you to some extreme measures here!

You don’t notice when you fall asleep, but you notice when you’re in your living room again, sunshine sprawling across the floor. Vriska’s in your armchair and weird army jacket outfit, scooched all the way up to your knees hanging off the couch. She’s grinning.

“Soooooooo,” she says. Her voice is plain blue, not at all like Karkat’s. “How was your daaaaaaaay?”

“Pretty good,” you say. “I found out I can fly! And see sounds! Who knew I had it in me! I guess the power was inside me all along.”

She folds her arms and pouts. “Hey, I gave that to you! With my sexy sexy sex. Don’t take all the credit!”

You poke her knee and she squeals. “I’m just joshing. I figured that out. I was pretty shocked!”

She bats your hand away. “Anyway, is that all the powers you got so far? You should be getting some more gifts pretty soon. And you don’t even have to have sex with me anymore to get them from now on! I mean, unless you, um, want to have sex with me again, I guess. Maybe more times. At least like, eight more times, that might be. Nice! Because you are. Nice, I mean. Ha ha, why are you looking at me like that???????? I’m not obsessed, you are!!!!!!!!”

She’s just digging herself into a hole while you watch and it’s amazing. You can’t help but reach out to tug on her arms, pulling her into your lap. You put your feet up on the armchair and she sits across your legs, arms wrapped around behind your neck. She grins at you, trying to hide her nervousness.

“Maybe we can have sex again another time, but only because I like you,” you say. Her grin gets genuine. “Hey, Vriska, I’ve got some questions I hope you can answer for me.”

“Oh John, you’re such a confused cutie. Whatcha got for me?”

“First off… what exactly are you? I know you’re a ghost trapped in a mirror, and you kind of give the impression that you’re old… but what else?”

“Oh, you mean you don’t remember? I already told you, stupid!” She removes her hand from your shoulders to flip her hair back. Shitty dream sparkles flutter around her. “I’m a goddess.”

You blink at her. “No you’re not.”

“Yes I am! I’m the god of luck, fortune…” she pauses to tilt so she can slap her own ass. “… and lust.”

You thought she was joking when she said she was “a goddess.” Well, stranger things have happened? Maybe.

“You’re a god of lust and you had a hard time kissing me?”

“I’m the god of lust, not the god of feelings! Jeez.” She huffs, then looks down. “Besides, it’s not just bodily lust, it’s like, anything you want. Treasure, power, idols, you name it, I own it.”

“Uh, okay. I will accept that… with suspicions. So, are you like, Hera or something? Some Norse goddess?”

“Pfft, do I look Norwegian to you? I don’t think so. I’m from a totally vanished religion in a country that doesn’t exist anymore. That’s okay though, it kind of sucked and I was too good for it. My rewards for the faithful were sick as hell— all who enjoyed my graces and worshiped my holy name were lavished with treasure and harems of nubile virgins.”

You can’t help but laugh. You kinda hope Vriska is telling the truth, because John ‘not into the sex thing’ Egbert wooing a god of the flesh is just too funny. It’s like, the ultimate prank, but on a cosmic scale. Your pranksters gambit is off the charts right about now.

“Hmm, okay, here’s a realization I am having,” you say. “So that story you told, about your friends killing you. Those were your fellow gods, right?”

“Yup! You’re a smart kid.”

“I know. Where are they? Are they stuck in dreams too?”

“They’re not important anymore! Just some nobodies.” She taps her finger against her chin, over-dramatically. “Weeeeeeeell, I guess one of them’s still important, but only because he could make or break our brilliant planning!”

“Who would that be?”

She gets all quiet and spooky, waggling her fingers as her voice turns into a slowly plodding line. “A total asshole! A god of control, who can use language and blood to rip apart a person in the blink of an eye. With just a few words, spoken really, really loudly, he could completely unmake and ruin a soul.”

You shiver. Vriska’s description was like something out of a good horror movie. “But we haven’t bumped into him yet, right?”

She leans in, her mouth expanding, lips stretching to expose her gargantuan smile. “Your sister’s dating him.”

Karkat? Karkat’s not scary at all! Karkat’s hilarious, Karkat’s a complete dork, and Karkat has a kindergarten-level crush on Jade that could definitely not belong to a scary ancient god of control.

Wait… God of control? Your fists clench, despite yourself. “He’s not… hurting her, is he?”

“Not from what I can tell, he’s actually being pushed around by her most of the time, which is absolutely pathetic! He was always-” she hesitates, then brushes away the thought with a swipe of her hand. “Anyway, the important thing is, he could take away your new powers with a single word! He’s pretty strong, despite his looks! And you’ve been doing so well, keeping this a secret. It’d be a shame if we were to lose it all right now.”

You narrow your eyes. This is the meat of it all, what you really want to know. “Keep what a secret?”

“That you’re going to be my heir.”

She plucks your hand from her thigh, begins to play with your fingers. She’s cool against your skin, sharp nails pricking gently against your palm as she entwines and untangles her hands with your own. You’re distracted by that, the feeling of her paying attention to you. When she appearifies a shiny ring around your pinky, made especially for you, you fucking melt. You’re done for, putty in her hands. You would let her mold you all day, make you into whatever she wanted. You’d love it.

“That’s what my gift was all about,” she says. Her voice leaves a flatter trail than usual, shiny peaks of blue sparkling like sapphires. She fingers your ring, spins it around a thinner part of your pinky. “I want you to have some things I can’t use inside your head. I can’t be a god inside your head. Where would I get my believers? So why not you? Why not you? You can do what I can’t, right now! John, you deserve the best. I want to give that to you. Power. My power. You said you liked it, right? Flying and sound and stuff. You’re going to be something special. I bet you’d like more of that, huh?”

She slips another ring around your pointer finger. It’s beautiful, a heavy inlaid blue stone on a thick band of gold. Reminds you of a class ring, but not as campy. You get the shivers as she puts it on, and you want more. “Yeah. This is fun. I mean, flying and stuff, is fun.”

“I wonder what kind of god you’ll be?” she says. She slides her hand down to your wrist, silky smooth and slow, and you feel the thick, lovely weight of a bracelet press itself on you. “Doesn’t matter, right? Because you’ll be mine no matter what, and you’re going to like it.”

She kisses your cheek. You can feel her laughing, just barely. You like it, like that she’s happy, like that you’re hers while also feeling just a little weirded out. Boring, realistic thoughts like ‘boundaries’ and ‘what do you mean what kind of god I’ll be’ come barging into your head.

“Vriska, this is some weird BDSM shit you’re doing.” Your sound is coming out as a broken, stuttered line. “I mean, I maybe sort of like it, but you’re not using your lust powers on me, are you? Making me want this? You’re not controlling me, are you?”

“I could have when we first met, if I reaaaaaaaally wanted to. But I didn’t. I like winning fair and square after all.” You roll your eyes, and she beams at you. “But you get a special perk, and not just from your growing levels of godhood! I can’t force you to do something even if I wanted to!”

“Why’s that?”

She leans in over your shoulder, puts her lips right up to your ear, and you swear you feel her breaths through your very soul. With a voice so, so quiet, but with a line thick and engorged in front of your eyes, she whispers,

“I can’t use mind control on my own worshipers.”

Holy shit.

Chapter Text

You don’t want to be a god.

You really, really don’t want to be a god.

Being a god sounds like you have to have awful responsibilities. Like you’ve got to be a manager of a store but on a worldwide scale, and judging by how boring your brief manager stint at T.J. Maxx was you don’t think you’d be very happy with the whole being a god thing. Also, like, overhauling world religious order with your mere existence? Ha ha, yeah, no thank you.

You lay in bed and just let your alarm beep and beep and beep as you try to digest what Vriska apparently “gifted” you with. You shouldn’t have had sex with her, shouldn’t have even gone there. What were you thinking, like, everybody in the Ghostbusters franchise would be so ashamed of you if they were real. Sleeping with a ghost and a mysterious ancient power? That was kind of the plot of the first movie, and a major metropolis almost got destroyed at the end of that story!

Hopefully yours will end up better? How do you stop being a god? Maybe you have to just bang her again and it’ll transfer back, although you’d have a hard time working up the will to do it again knowing what you do now. Even though you like her, but you also think she’s crazy, but you also like her, but she’s totally crazy, but you really really like her… Guh, what do you do.

Well, go to work, for one. That organ won’t play itself.

It’s a Sunday, and for the first time in your life, you’re deathly nervous during Mass. Your hands are shaking, you’re sweating buckets, you have to take your organ shoes off so you can use your own gross nasty skin to keep friction against the pedals. Even with your earplugs in, you can see your blue organ soundwaves bouncing around the church, smacking against columns and rebounding into the ceiling.

The rehearsal with the choir goes even worse. You can’t zone out for once, can’t let yourself just be, can’t keep your mind off gods and monsters and Vriska Vriska Vriska. The colors of sound from every one of the voices are more of an annoyance than anything, another reminder of how you’re suddenly very weird and very different.

You finish the runthrough of the last movement, the really epic part where there’s a gargantuan swell in sound that you usually love, but today just makes you shake. You can tell the choir director notices. He sets his hands on the podium stand, and looks across the stage at you earnestly.

“Is something wrong? You look ill.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry, I’m having a bad day,” you say, attempting to smile. Your voice is the same color as your organ and it’s distracting. “I know I didn’t sound very good.”

“I thought you sounded fine,” says a random young lady from the choir. “Although I gotta say you do look glum.”

“Yeah, cheer up!” says another lady. “We all think you’re awesome. We’re rooting for you, ya know.”

And to your surprise, you find that they are, in fact, rooting for you.

You can feel it, this really big burst of warmth right in the center of your chest, all the tiny bits of encouragement and empathy and little cheers some of the choir are generating just for you. And you know it’s some stupid god related shit, somehow, but it still makes you feel good. An inhuman sort of good, a good that straightens your back up and stills your hands and causes the echoes of sound in the cathedral to glow ever the brighter. You like feeling this, this very kind, gentle power ebbing through you. Yeah! You are awesome! You can do it!

And with that, you run through the section again.

This time, their voices are a grab-bag of colors instead of a hindrance, a big, fun rainbow you can draw your thick blue line through. You let yourself unfocus just enough to play, but not enough to completely lose track of what the lines are doing. They seem so tangible, like if you think hard enough…

There’s this rundown towards the end of the first part, something your organ director always told you was the rising storm coming to destroy mortal men. It’s really epic, you pretty much play the rain and thunder and lighting while the choir is humanity and the orchestra is destruction. That’s one of the hardest parts of the piece for you, because your rain always sounds like a light sprinkle. But if you make your sound thicker, make the vibration and wind flowing through the pipes just a bit wider, will your line to dip and bend in places you’d have a hard time playing, that’ll sure as heck solve all your problems!

You pulse your line during the phrase in question, force it to glow darker blue here, lighter blue there, give it that ‘oomph’ you could never get your hands to play. You change the sound at it’s very core, with your will alone. You sound good and you know it, and if your organ director were here today, she’d probably shed a tear.

Do you have sound-editing powers? Sweet.

When you’re done, the choir director pulls you aside, and tells you how fantastic you sounded.

You say “thanks,” and you mean it. You feel good. Really good. All the appreciation the choir and the director have for your playing is just building up into some great electric warmth. Like you’re high on adrenaline without the super fast heartbeats, like you could take on the whole world without blinking an eye.

Maybe this god thing won’t be so bad after all.

*********

You dream you’re in your living room again. You don’t wait for her to start this time. “Vriska, if I’m a god, do I have like, responsibilities? Do I have to wear crowns and sit on thrones and live in the clouds? What do I have to do?”

She leans back in your armchair, rolling her fingers together. “Well, nothing. You don’t have to do a single thing if you’re a loser and don’t want to. I mean, you’re kind of immortal now and can wither away and be forgotten and die if you don’t get enough offerings or worshippers or whatever, but with your profession and what you’re going to be the god of, you won’t have a hard time staying alive.”

“What am I going to be the god of?”

She strokes her chin, totally unironically. “I thought you were going to be a god of wind, what with the whole flying thing, but now it looks more like you're going to be a god of sound. You’re probably both, actually, me and my pals all got three aspects each. Although sound and wind have basically nothing to do with each other!”

“Uh, wrong, they’re totally related! Sounds are just fancy vibrations, you know! Like blowing air through a pipe!” You ‘pbbft’ to demonstrate. Vriska does not look amused.

“Whatever! Hey, let’s go somewhere fun, I’ll give you a tour of my old temple.” She doesn’t wait for you to agree, just grabs you by the wrists, hops up on her feet, and hoists you right with her.

You very suddenly, and with no scene transition, warp to Vriska’s temple. It’s a lot brighter than you pictured when she said “old temple,” you were thinking some spooky Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom kind of thing, but instead it looks like a fancy pavilion in the mid-afternoon. You’re in some kind of courtyard, big clay brick arches lining the walls, wispy jungle vines dangling from the flat roof, and some open doors leading into what you assume is the inner sanctum. The floor is entirely mosaic tile, in the shape of the sun, and the outline of it is indented into the ground a few inches. It looks like something’s supposed to flow through it.

“It was gold,” Vriska says, noticing you staring at the gutters. “Melted gold used to come from my bedroom up there-” she points through the door. “- and flow down here.”

“Wouldn’t that be too hot to work without melting everything?”

“Hell no, I’m basically magic. I mean, yeah, if you touched the river of lava your hand would fall off but that’s your own damn fault.”

She tugs on your wrist, pulls you inside. It’s still pretty bright, like the sun is coming from every direction despite that being completely impossible. There’s no glass on the windows, but they’re big and open and draped with mosquito netting that flashes by as Vriska tugs you down the hallway.

“How old did you say you were again?” you ask, trying to look at the netting as you speed down the hallway. “Call me uneducated, but I didn’t think wacky ancient village craftspeople could knit that tiny.”

“Yeah? Well they could! Thanks to me! Giving a few blessings and wealth to talented families ends up paying off down the line when they start mixing their crafty genes together.”

“Oh, right, living gods probably manage to goof up a culture a whole bunch. Like, giving fire to people when they aren’t ready for it and stuff like that.”

She halts in front of the big awning at the end of the hallway, a huge tapestry with a jagged sun covering an entrance to somewhere. You almost trip into the gutters with how fast she stops you.

“I guess we were advanced, at least in comparison to where humanity is now, what the rate of progress should have been, you guys could have been exploring space by now…” she says, not looking at you. “I mean, without me, I guess everything went down the tubes! It’d be nice to bring that back, you know? Me. Us. Gods. I think it’d make things a lot better for everyone, honestly! We had a great time back in the day! Everyone did! Except you know, a few dozen blood sacrifices and cannibalistic sheeple on weekends and holidays, but none of that was for me.”

“Blood sacrifices! Cannibalism! Wow, it’s like a vintage, racist snuff film! What kind of god was into that?”

She turns to you then, and grins. “Karkat, duh.”

You freeze up. Karkat’s not… Karkat can’t be that kind of god. The evil Aztec-y ones who kick people down stairs after eating their hearts. That is absolutely the opposite of who the guy is, you’d picture him crying or something if he had to do that. Like, what do you even get from those kind of sacrifices? Whatever it is, killing people (and eating them?) wouldn’t be worth that.

She must see the plethora of facial expressions you’re going through, because she says, “Relax, he’s really mellowed out! Jade’s safe. I mean, if he hasn’t already-” she waggles her eyebrows. “-indulged in her.”

You wince. “You know, that is a thousand times more gross when you’re referring to literally eating my sister, and not sexually eating my sister. Eeuuuughhh. And Karkat, mellowed out? No way!”

“Yes way! It's because he got weak. Here, let me tell you something, and pay attention because it’s kind of about you!”

She tugs you behind the tapestry, into what appears to be her bedroom. It’s gargantuan, bright, and decorated like a rich old white lady into crafting got her hands on a pirate’s treasure chest. The whole thing is wall-to-wall covered in gold coins, beads, and disco ball-like structures of Vriska’s favorite mineral. They reflect the light with such ferocity you’re afraid you might go blind.

Vriska, totally undaunted by the searchlight of her room, pulls you further in. “There are two ways for a god to maintain power,” she says. “There’s offerings, first and foremost, where somebody gives up something for the god. For example, Karkat really liked the bloodletting thing. If somebody cut their chest up for him, bam, his power level  goes up by ten points. Also, if someone wrote him romance poetry as an offering he’d basically orgasm."

You blink the light away, your eyes adjusting. “Yeah, he would.”

“The second way to maintain power is the one nobody remembers. It’s a heck of a lot weaker than getting blood offerings or whatever your domain is, but if you get enough people together to do it, your power levels go off the charts!”

You barely manage to hold back a snicker. You say, deadpan, “Over nine thousand?”

“Yes, absolutely, your power levels would be far over nine thousand! The second way to maintain power is belief. Belief in what you’re capable of, of your existence, that you will come to them in a moment of darkness, in a moment of prayer. I noticed you feeling this when those choir nobodies were depending on you.”

You frown. “Yeah, but that wasn’t the kind of belief you’d associate with gods and religion and stuff. That was more, everyday, ‘you can do it!’ sort of thing.”

“Same difference, it’s easy to get by on a technicality with these kinds of things! Anyway, that’s going to be really important for you soon.”

You wonder why. She sits down on a big stack of pillows in front of you, all weaved and embroidered with the most intricate gold thread you’ve ever seen. You feel kind of honored to sit down in a place ancient craftspeople worked really hard on for Vriska.

“So, what kind of wacky sacrifices do you like, then?” you ask, sitting shoulder to shoulder with her. “Wait, no, dumb question. You probably got people. Like a weird harem. Like a bad 80s porn about ‘Arabia’ or something.”

“Hell yeah! It was the best,” she says, pumping her fists. “They’d worshipped me their whole lives, so becoming my property was basically the accumulation-”

“Don’t you mean, ‘a-cum-ulation’?”

She thwacks you on the shoulder while you break out into juvenile giggles. “-of all their efforts.”

She turns to you then, and looks at you with eyes that can best be described as ‘ravenous.’ She says to you, “Those people who offered themselves to me, my worshippers… You know what I did with them? I dressed them up in gold and fucked ‘em.”

That was literally the worst pickup line you’ve ever heard in your life, even disregarding that weird thing she said about 'property,' but it still makes you shiver.

She leans back into the pillows, her body making a soft ‘poof’ noise against them. “Of course, I liked the good stuff too, gold, jewelry, expensive fortune telling devices, you name it! I mean, that was kind of a common offering no matter what kind of god you were, but I got the most out of it! Felt soooooooo good to get the last of a families savings, or an important heirloom donated to me, or hell, just a tithe was nice.”

You point at yourself. “What about me?”

“Hmm?”

“What gives me power? Besides belief.”

“I think… No, of course I’m right. I know exactly what you want.” She sits back up, then slaps her hand onto your upper arm like she’s going to give you ‘The Talk.’ “And because I'm so nice, I'll give it to you. Don’t laugh! Or I’ll kill you before you wake up!”

“Can’t promise anything!” She glowers at you, and you laugh. “Okay, fine, no laughing past this point. A Serious John, all the time, forever. Tell me how I get power!”

Vriska stares at you for a long time, her face flushing so hard she looks like one of those cartoon thermometers. When you open your mouth to say something, she visibly panics, closes her eyes shut tight, and says, “This is for you!”

Vriska starts to sing.

You manage to restrain every urge to start laughing. It’s very hard.

It’s godawful too, it sounds like that one time you watched a documentary about Egypt and they showed these funeral wailing ladies on the Nile, who had this dual toned, eerie scream. That’s kind of what Vriska sounds like, but you guess with maybe more of a melody? Her sound-line looks like fragile glass, flitting between the metric tons of gold charms hanging in the room. Maybe it's not awful awful, it's just that you're not used to how she sings.

Two seconds in, and you forget all that. You forget how weird she sounds, how foreign her singing is, because adrenaline is currently pounding through every nerve you have. Your heart hammers with her embarrassment, her nervousness, how hard this is for her to do, to perform something she knows she’s bad at but tries anyway just for you! It’s this warmth that spreads through your whole body, like you’re dipping yourself in the hot spring of her lifeforce.

This is an 'offering,' huh? You don’t want it to ever end.

You’re not sure how long it is before she stops, and the fuzzy, sweet warmth all down your back zaps out of existence with her last ‘note.’ You sigh out this completely unintentional and straight from the heart, “Oh, wow, thank you…” You feel like you just had a really long, really good back massage, and you revel in the afterglow.

You want to feel that again. You wonder if you can get somebody to sing for you in real life. Maybe it wouldn’t work if you asked them, maybe they’d have to do it of their own free will to get it to work... Either way, that was nice! You take back all your bad feelings about this whole godhood thing, this is great! Vriska’s looking at you like she accomplished something, and you can’t help but be thankful. Tonight’s a good night for it anyway.

“I’d like to return the favor to you, my lovely and all-powerful goddess. Here's my offering.” You spread out your arms, all like, ‘hey it’s okay to fuck me today,’ and try not to laugh at how embarrassed Vriska looks reacting to your hokey compliment. Score. You lower your voice to a thin sound-line, a stage whisper. “I’m saying you should probably dress me up in gold and fuck me.”

Vriska literally says the words, “Ha ha ha,” before stammering out a, “No way, you can’t seduce me! It doesn’t work that way! I’m destined to be the one seducing you, not the other way around.”

You swivel towards her and push her into the pillows with a funny ‘doof.’ You lean over her, planting your arms around her shoulders, and put on your super suave and totally sexy Nic Cage pout. That clearly gives her a case of the vapors, since she gets this huge goofy grin like you just punched her in the face.

“Well, okaaaaaaaay,” she says, trying to sound cool and failing. Her sound flickers in the gold light underneath you. “If you insist. Although since I gave my godhood to you, it won’t feel as good! Don’t expect to impress me with your lame sexy skills this time, since there won’t be that offering-based high to help me out.”

You wink, with as much gentlemanly charm you can put into it, and Vriska swoons. Time for the killer line. “Vriska, you are going to have so much fun playing dress up with me, gold is going to flow down places you didn’t even know you had.”

Vriska bites back a flustered grin. You don’t even have to look to know that those ancient gutters are about to flood with a river of molten gold.

*********

When the Berlin Philharmonic comes, three days before the concert, you’re ready to give it your all. You can’t understand their German, but a lot of them know English, and when they come and talk to you to tell you how good you sounded when you were practicing pre-rehearsal, it feels really good to receive their praise and compliments. It gives you this weird sort of strength, this power where you know you’ll do well because of them.

It’s the first full ensemble rehearsal ever. Everyone’s here, the organ director in the stands, the maestro of the Philharmonic conducting the orchestra, the choir, and you. And when the baton swings down, and you begin to play your very first solo, you know with absolute certainty that when the time comes, you and the concert will go perfectly.

Everyone sounds incredible together, looks incredible in your fancy sound vision, and your soul swells with every crescendo, every rundown, every epic threesome of song and power and harmony in the apocalyptic piece. Editing your own part comes naturally, you want to sound darker here, dryer here… and you fit yourself in like a puzzle piece to their perfect sound.

When you finish rehearsal, you feel the ebb and flow of their belief in you, and you’re afraid you’re glowing like Moses from how you radiate happiness.

The organ director notices. She grabs your shoulders on your way out, spins you around with a fervor in her voice.

“John, oh, John, you were beautiful. I thought I was witnessing the heavens opening up, you tearing them apart with your own hands during that last phrase. My god, I suspected it before, but now, I am very sure you’re going to be a great master of our age.”

You always thought she was exaggerating with compliments like these, but when you hear her say that, you realize she actually, truly means this, and it takes all you have to not burst her soundwave into fireworks out of happiness. When you leave, you can’t help but hover to your car in the dark church parking lot.

You love this! You can’t wait until you’ve got a bigger audience who will all love your solos. That’s going to feel so good!

You spend the next evenings and days in a blur of organ playing and Vriska. Mostly Vriska, actually, any worries you had about your performance went away with the Deus Ex Machina appearance of your magical sound editing powers. You like talking to her a whole lot, and you end up spending hours of dream time recounting the plots of your favorite movies for her line by line while she listens, completely riveted. You also like listening to her stories too, stories about all the people she’s helped, how she wants to be alive again, how she wants to be good to everyone, and you’re totally going to help her out!

It’ll be great having a friend like her in real life.

The night before the concert, you slip away to the top of your apartment building. It’s not very high, not like Dave’s, but it’s tall enough to get a good view of the city lights. You close your eyes, and focus on the sounds of the city, all the cars and creaking and neon buzzing, and you see them as a dim vibration of line over the black of your eyelids. You reach your hands out, to help you balance, and very slowly, very subtly, you quiet the city.

Shhhh, only dreams now.

You only do it by a little, maybe a decibel or two, but it’s noticeable in your eardrums and noticeable in the color of the city soundlines dimming just a bit in the blackness. You raise it back up to normal, and open your eyes.

You come to the realization you could go much further if you wanted to, hush out everything, kill every sound and every voice in the city just by thinking about it. You've got the power, got it from the whole ensemble believing in you. Everything would be deafened, if you wanted it so. But that wouldn’t be very nice. You won’t be that kind of god, you’ll be the good kind! The kind that uses their powers to make sweet music and fly around when no one’s looking, like some kind of hipster superhero.

Vriska gives you a ‘pump-up’ speech the night before your concert premiere, massages your shoulders and attempts to condense a training montage into real life like how you told her that scene in Rocky went. You mostly just laugh at her.

You still have to work the next day, and you’re surprisingly focused and confident. You guess it’s because you feel good about yourself? You really like these god powers, they’re sick as hell.

When you get back to your apartment, Jade and Karkat made dinner for you, and it’s terrible, like, they made hamburgers on a frying pan with a bunch of breadcrumbs shoved in it and neglected a bun. You guess you’re probably just a snooty Seattle yuppie and judgemental about food, but you eat it anyway. It was made with love! And you feel the “offering” in the same way as how Vriska sang for you, but dimmer and not as effective.

Jade is basically bouncing while she eats her weird hamburger patty. “I’m so excited for your concert, John! You’re going to sound so good! I can’t wait to see you!”

The support from your sister makes you light headed. “Oh, yeah, me too, thank you.”

She places her fork down, and stops bouncing. “Also you’ve been acting weird this past week, and I think it’ll be good for you to get the stress over and done with. This is pretty important, right?”

“Have I been acting weird?” You laugh nervously. “I didn’t notice. It’s probably stress. Yeah, it’ll probably go away when the concerts over…”

It won’t. You’ll just have to figure out how to get out of that drifty, floaty, happy state you’re in most of the time now. Maybe post-concert.

After dinner, while you’re washing dishes in your concert tux (you don’t have a lot of time before you have to be at church), Jade says something like, “I’m leaving! I want to ride around the city a bit,” and you say your goodbye to her without really paying attention. You’re scrubbing a plate, thinking about how high-on-life you’re going to feel later tonight, and you kick up your feet and float up near the sink.

You guess Jade wanted to ride around the city in her fancy dress on her motorcycle? You wouldn’t blame her, you’d do that too if you had a motorcycle license and a black glittery ballgown. You wonder what Karkat looks like tonight. Is he dressed up for your concert too? Thinking of him holding onto the backseat for dear life in a rumpled suit is hilarious. Wait, hold on, did Jade even take Karkat with her?

You weren’t paying attention. Maybe she’s coming back to pick him up? You should probably stop hovering around like some total god noob and get flat on your feet in case he comes out of his-

“John, are you-”

You drop your plate into the water. The sound ripples out in shades of dark red. You turn midair, too panicked to set yourself on the ground, and find Karkat standing at the end at the kitchen, his eyes wide and mouth gaping like he’s the white frat bro in a horror movie.

“Holy- What are you- You’re flying, you can’t do that, get down from there, stop defying the laws of physics and humans and-”

He pauses. His face gets dark. Glowering. Dead serious. And you can’t even make a funny metaphor out of that expression, because you are very suddenly terrified as balls.

This is exactly what you didn’t want. Vriska said he could take away your powers. You don’t want that! Not now, not when you’re so close. You’ve got to prevent that, at all costs.

With a voice flat and long and in pure gray, he says, “What the fuck is going on.”

Chapter Text

“Just, you know,” you say, putting your innocent grin on while setting yourself down on the ground as calm as you possibly can. “Washing dishes.”

Karkat stares at you, mouth hanging open. “Why would you even try to lie, what the fuck are you thinking, like-” he pinches the bridge of his nose. “No, you know what, we’ve clearly passed the supernatural point of no return here, and even I, a master of zenhood, has his limits. I’m going to ask you again. And I’m going to make you answer. Because apparently John ‘Pinocchio’ Egbert can’t grow up and become a real boy when he’s caught fucking levitating in mid-air. So, once more, with feeling-

-what the fuck is going on.”

A pure red line, painful in its brightness, plays across your eyes as he says those last words. You feel like a child getting scolded by your dad when you hear his voice, like you have to come clean no matter what the cost. And you realize, as you open your mouth to answer, what Karkat’s power allows him to do.

He orders people around.

“Vriska made me a god,” you say. “She was in that mirror you had, and I broke it into myself and now she’s stuck in my head and we have crazy dream hangout time while she schools me on being a god of wind and sound and something else we haven’t figured out yet.”

You slap your hands over your mouth as soon as you say it. Okay, Karkat might be a god of voice or command or whatever he is, but you’re the god of sound. Next time he tries something like that, you’ll be able to handle it.

Karkat blinks twenty times in rapid succession, then leans forward like he didn’t hear you. “What?” he says, in plain gray. “What!? Seriously, what did I just hear? Let me just sit here and digest that. You, John Egbert, king of irresponsibility and prevalent niceties, apparently decided to take on a job role exclusively about responsibility, and fraternize with a personality on the complete opposite scale of what you represent.”

You scratch the back of your head. “I dunno, she kind of sexed me into that first one?”

Karkat ignores you, and starts gesturing like a bad Jersey Shore stereotype. “Actually, the more I think about this, the angrier I get! What do you mean Vriska isn’t dead and fucking buried? What do you mean she was in my mirror? I’ve been carrying that gaudy thing around with me since fucktime mystery century for scrapbooking purposes and you mean to tell me she was in that *the whole time?* Did she trick past-me into carting around that damn vanity station as a memento? I can’t believe he fell for that!”

“You know past-you is still… you, right?” you say. You kind of want to leave but watching Karkat throw a tantrum is like watching a drunk marching band try to play Stars and Stripes.

He contorts his spine so he’s yelling straight up at the ceiling. “And secondly! Secondly! You’re one of us now? Which is absolutely horrifying considering the position you’re in, considering what you’re going to do in a mere few hours. Like, that puts spooky campfire stories to shame with how chilling you being a god is. I know *exactly* what’s going to happen to you and your moral code after tonight, and let me tell you, they are getting flushed straight down the tubes into the dark sewer of god-John which will take centuries to clean out.”

He marches up real close to you, stares you down, and jams his pointer finger against your nose. “You think you’re so clever, but I’m onto your little plan, Vriska. And I’m going to put a stop to it right the fuck now.”

That makes your heart go into palpitations, and wind swirls around you in a sudden gust, sending the dishtowels flying and hurling Karkat backwards. He manages to catch himself on the counter a few feet away, staggering and attempting to catch his breath.

“Oh, god, you’re into this,” he says, gaping. “You really want to be a goddamn monster. You’ve been brainwashed by her, haven’t you? You’re totally wiped over by the doctrine of the church of Vriska.”

“I haven’t been brainwashed!” you say. “I like all the sweet powers I get. I want to keep them. And Vriska’s a friend.”

“And you don’t think she's completely off her rocker? That a normal person would book it and run immediately upon her opening her mouth?”

“Uh, well, she was weird at first, but I couldn’t really run since she’s kind of in my head.” You think for a moment. “Also, yeah, I like her a lot. She might be a little off, but she’s goofy and fun and cute.”

“Goofy and… well, if that wasn’t a clear indicator she was mind controlling you, I don’t know what is.”

“She’s not mind controlling me! She said she couldn’t do that to worshipers.”

Oh, oops, you probably shouldn’t have let that slip. Karkat turns beet red, and you can just feel the embarrassment seep off of him. “Holy shit, you’re in deep. Way way way too deep. I am going to have to get you out of this disgusting situation *immediately.*”

He starts to say something in red, but this time you’re ready for it. You’re not sure what he’s going to say, but you silence it as soon as the color leaves his lips. Take all of the nuance right out of it with just a thought. It sounds exactly like muffled background noise when it hits your ears.

Karkat’s eyes open wide. “What did you just do?”

You don’t answer.

“No, wait, don’t answer that. I’m not going to mess with your weak human languages, I’m pulling out the big guns immediately and taking you out before you learn to defend against-” he gestures at his mouth. “-this. Hope you’re ready.”

He takes a deep breath, like he’s going to blow your house down, then says something that’s not in English. Or any language you’ve ever heard, really. You literally are unable to compare anything in his statement to any linguistic structures that you’ve ever heard in your life. Your mind can’t even wrap itself around the word he says; trying to pick up on grammar and structure in his voice is like trying to get a fistful of water. The line from it is gargantuan. He’s not speaking that loud, well, not any louder than how he normally speaks, but the thing is like this buster sword your measly powers can’t even hope to counter.

When you hear the word, you feel like a hammer just smacked into the bell of your soul. You resonate with whatever he said, resonate with the wind through your bones and the chill down your spine and the tone which stabs you straight through the heart. You realize, with a cold sort of fear, he just said your name. You always thought your name was ‘John,’ but that was just something shallow, that never ever encompassed who you are. What Karkat said skipped past all the linguistic processes to call to your very self, and you know you won’t be able to resist whatever he says next. If he told you to straight up die, in that same voice, you would drop dead without question.

He’s going to take away your godhood with just a word. So, you stick your hand into your pocket, grab your earplugs, and jam them in as hard as you can.

Karkat says something else in that huge, huge line that spans your whole vision. But you don’t hear a thing. You let the line play out in front of you, with only the sound of your own heart filling your ears. He blinks at you when he finishes, then says in a gray line you can parse like you’re reading music, “Oh. Shit.”

You silently say thanks to whoever invented specially molded earplugs. Karkat’s worries or not, you can’t miss your concert! You’ve got to be at the best you can be, and there’s a lot of people waiting for you to play, believing in you. That feel-good fuzziness wells up in you, and you decide this is a good time to make your escape.

You fly up, propelling yourself over the kitchen counter. Karkat lunges for your ankle, grabs it, and pulls you back with a crack the whip kind of motion. You kick him in the nose as hard as you possibly can while yelling “Sorry!” and push back off his face to get away.

You go careening into the living room floor from the momentum, and scramble onto your feet, lunging for the door. Your palm touches the doorknob when you feel the slimy, unmistakable squelch of blood on your wrist.

A whole lot of blood, actually, enough to act as a tight handcuff and stop you from turning the knob. It feels like someone pressed one of those water wigglys against you tight enough to cut off your circulation. You toss your head over your shoulder to look behind you.

Karkat’s standing there, palm held out to you, crouching and huffing and puffing like he just ran a marathon. His tattoos are opened and gutted, this shiny red muscle glowing through his shirt and skin, and blood-made-chains cut from his wrist lead to your ankles and hands, stopping you from moving.

“Karkat!” you say, panicked. He’s really got you tight. “Karkat, don’t take this away from me, I need to be able to play the best I can, I can’t do that without my powers!”

Karkat’s line is still gray, readable even in your deafness with its ups and downs and inflection.

“It’s not- it’s not about that. Look, I’m really…” Karkat is silent for a few seconds, catching his breath, and he stands. His line is calm, flattened, easy and clear to read with your eyes. “Let us die, John.”

“Uh? Karkat, don't be emo.”

“No, I mean, let the old gods die. Me. Vriska. And you. Let us live out the rest of whatever lives we had left without bringing back the myths. Without the blood sacrifices, without the decadence, without the genocide, without the gods that drive you crazy in lust. Past-me deserves all that, deserves all the shit coming to him, but not me. Not this world. Please don’t bring all that doomsday cult schmaltz back, because if you go play this concert, you absolutely will.”

What is he talking about? You shuffle-turn to him, trying not to trip over the blood chains on your ankles. “Karkat, I’m not that kind of guy! I’m not into cannibalism and drinking blood and killing people, like, I dig it when people sing for me. I’m not like you!”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s different when you’re full. You get warped. Anyway, look, I hate throwing you around like this, and I’m really not in the condition to fight you past this point, thanks to this surprisingly high energy expenditure you’ve forced me to do-”

He points at his wrist, where the blood chains are coming from. Is Karkat really that weak? That he can’t handle something little like this? Vriska was really talking him up if that’s the case.

“-so I’m just going to hold you here until you miss your magnum opus or whatever. Again, really sorry, nothing to do about it.”

You want to say, ‘that is a terrible plan.’ But instead you say, “Pathetic!”

Karkat freezes. You also freeze. Wow, that was not at all what you meant to say, what’s-

“You’re even more of a loser since I last saw you and I didn’t think that were possible!”

That must be Vriska. Hi Vriska! Kind of weird how she’s using your mouth like that.

Karkat blinks a few times, then says with a very hard to parse line, “Vrizthkhtkahsirkret? Heatiiontphzezixttzchtseses.”

“Zigsha- uggggggggh, yuck. John’s throat is not made for that,” she says, contorting your face into something that probably looks wonky on you. “Long time no see, Karkat! I thought I’d just jump in here and meddle because John really wants to play his concert, and I can’t believe you’re stopping him! I’m appalled at the thought, actually, that you’d take away his dreams like that.”

Karkat doesn’t say anything, just narrows his eyes.

“Anyway, I’m going to get you to let him go right now, without even having to seduce you! You were always weak to that, so I don’t think that would be fair. Look at me, being so nice and operating on your level,” she says through you. You can hear your voice saying it, feel your mouth moving it, but it’s not you. It’s not in your color either, somewhere between your blue and Vriska’s blue. “So, here goes: If you stop him from playing this concert, there’s a certain someone who will be very, very mad at you! Stopping her brother from playing the concert that’ll define his life? Gosh, I’d hate to be on the receiving end of that angry Jade tornado!”

You can read his lips with this response, he’s really clear about it. “It doesn’t matter.”

“But it does, weak little god. Little god who’s fallen to mortal problems. You never could manage all the cards in your hand, could you? You were always the worst of all of us, you know, the one who fell pray to emotions and power and all sorts of things that forced your hand and forced a whole lot of deaths! You were so weak, so so so weak, and I see you haven’t changed one bit. And because of that, Karkat, because you’re so weak… You’ll listen to everything Harley says, won’t you? I see the way you look at her, and that kind of look isn’t in my domain. It’s too bad she won’t go on a date with you, huh? It’s too bad that the way she looks at you is the picture perfect ideal of what I’m the god of.”

You see him yell “Shut up,” and his line is as thick and as red as he can make it while still using English.

“Point is,” she says. “Miss Harley’s not going to listen when you say John is in cahoots with a dead god and that’s why you stopped her dear brother from performing! She’ll think you’re crazy. She’ll totally dump you. She doesn’t trust you. Because, let me tell you, your glowing personality is the last thing she’s hanging around with you for! You’ll have to show me your tricks sometime, because I’m actually impressed that you’re so good with your body you manage to keep an amazing girl like her by your side.”

Vriska laughs then, and she laughs bigger and fuller than you ever do, and it sure gives your lungs a huge workout.

You wonder if that’s all true. It kind of makes sense Jade’s only in it for the booty— they argue a lot and she probably doesn’t want to date anybody seriously right after breaking up with sweet precious Dave Strider. But she’s nice. Inherently, wonderfully nice, and you don’t think that your sister could use someone like that. Sure, she’s probably not head-over-heels for him (who gets that into somebody after only a month? Jeez, Karkat, get it together) but she probably likes him on some level.

He lowers his palm, eyes open wide, a picture of defeat. Vriska activates your wind powers, blows the blood around your wrists and ankles away so it spatters all over the living room. Oh, goddammit Vriska, that is going to be so hard to clean.

“I’ll kill you again,” he says, softly, in gray. “Even if it kills me too. I’ll finish the fucking job where Terezi apparently couldn’t. I’ll do it right now. I can fight you, I can rip out those earcloggers, send you straight to oblivion in four words, don’t think I won’t.”

“You won’t,” she says, breaking your face into a grin. “Past-you could have, but present-you? Weak. Worthless. A slave to a human girl who doesn’t love him back, a slave to overrated scruples and morals past-you never had.”

What Vriska said gets to him. You watch him slump down, head hanging, hair hiding his eyes. You watch him breathe, deep enough to move his shoulders a visible amount, and he points his finger towards the door. He’s letting you leave. He’s letting you finally, finally play the concert you’ve been waiting your whole life for. He wants you to go.

So you do.

*********

You put all that out of your mind with how giddy you feel.

There’s television cameras set up at the cathedral, the big moveable ones on cranes, which are probably going to give your face some great close up shots in HD. Your dad is going to be so proud when he sees you on TV, and your friends who couldn’t make it, and your weird extended family you never talk to. You forgot what stations this is going to be on. Definitely a few different PBS iterations, for sure.

You don’t feel like talking much with the other musicians before the concert starts. It kind of feels like a huge effort to open your mouth, actually! Like it’s hard to make your body do stuff for you. It’s probably from all the “good lucks!” you’re getting from the musicians. Of course you thank them for the well wishes, but you’re content to stay silent in the pre-concert excitement. You like stewing in the fuzziness of your soul from all that delicious belief.

The Philharmonic and choir walk onto the stage to thunderous applause from a packed cathedral. After the orchestra gets in tune, you take your time walking down the aisle to your organ console. You can’t believe you’re not even a little bit nervous, you just kind of feel like this is destiny.

The orchestra director steps up to the podium, gives a brief apocalyptic plot summary of this Book with Seven Seals remake, and raises his baton. You place your hands over the keys, breathe in with him, and begin the piece.

Slow note hold, two measures, two pedals. Buildup in G, adagio rundown, slow again, quick fake-out, beat drop: ba-duh-DUH! Rundown again, slow the pace, thirty six sixteen eight eight eight grace note, duh-dum. Follow conductor’s baton, raise here, the part where you edit your line to be silky-dark, use it for a triplet scale progression.

It’s mere seconds into your very first solo when you begin to feel it. It’s mostly coming from the audience packed into the booming cathedral, in awe of your righteous sound echoing through the grand ceilings. You feel belief, feel entertainment, feel faith, and even feel a little bit of fear as you fortissimo swell in buildup to the choir’s very first section. You can’t help but grin to yourself at all those feelings brewing in your heart. You especially like the fear of your sound, but that's kind of a weird thought and you put it out of your mind and just enjoy the glow all the belief gives you as a whole.

There certainly are a lot of people watching you, huh? Wow, this is only going to get better the more you go at it!

When the orchestra starts to play with you, you feel a little more of that belief well up inside you. It probably helps to add backup to your main theme, gives it some more depth, gets mortals into the music a bit more. There’s this long hold with the violas coming up, where the performance space gets a little too echo-y for your tastes. You dim the lines from the violas, make it impossibly sharper in the cathedral, and revel in the awe from the audience as they watch and listen.

The people watching on TV and listening to the radio finally get to you. You feel your dad in there, somewhere, with all his pride for you, but he blends into your other few thousand believers with their subtle pride and faith from listening to your playing at the concert.

When you have to rest, let the choir sing alone, you get very bothered by what your body is doing. You don’t want to feel your heart beating, you don’t want to have legs or arms or skin or whatever, you just want to be absorbed in the color of music, want to fly into the sound, want to play until your fingers fall off.

At intermission, you opt not to leave the console. You don’t think you could bother to walk if you stood up right now. You see Karkat and Jade in the pews to the right of you. Karkat has his head slumped over the back of the pew, like he fell asleep from exhaustion and no one bothered to wake him up. Jade waves at you, and it takes a great amount of effort to will the meatsack of your body to wave back.

When the second part starts, when people are excited to hear you once again, it’s almost unbearable. You feel like lightning as you play, feel like fire and rain and turbulent waves on an ocean, and it takes a while to notice you’re not really playing what your hands are doing. You’re simply thinking about the music you need to perform and creating your blue, blue line with all the right parts, while your dumb mortal fingers are just tripping over the ivory. There’s a dim thought in the back of your head like, ‘hope no one’s noticing what I’m doing,’ but that’s drowned out by all the bright color and sound and control swimming through your eyes.

Even faking the keys are just a formality at this point. You could perform this song alone if you wanted. All the parts, all the choir, all the orchestra, just by thinking.

When the final movement comes, the grand marriage between choir and orchestra and you, the belief in your piece is staggering. You have the captured attention of every audience member, due probably to the way you’re changing the piece to be perfect. You don’t want human error anymore. You don’t want anything but the fireworks of godhood in your soul. There’s no place for anything else left.

You can’t really see when you play the final note, your thoughts and will operating on autopilot after so many weeks of practicing the piece. Your vision is swimming with background noise, sepia tones of breathing, the colors of everyone here, your generated wind through your hair, your worshipers standing and clapping…

“John,” you whisper. Oh yeah, you forgot you have a mouth. “John. Get up. You have to bow.”

You forgot how. Bodies are hard. Vriska takes over for you, you think, and does the actions you practiced in rehearsal for the final applause. You don’t want to feel anything physical, don’t want to deal with it, and it’s such a pain against the soles of your feet when Vriska begins to walk you off the console with the rest of the orchestra.

Your head keeps lolling back, eyes closed, in this ecstatic, unbearably hot feeling flowing through your body. It’s kind of comical how Vriska has to snap it back up again. You wish she’d just let you leave.

Vriska starts walking you out of the church. You feel your clouds gather in the sky above you. You feel every drop of precipitation you form over Seattle. You feel the echo of thunder, lines of deep royal purple you make somewhere far away. When you feel the cool breeze on your face on the stairs into the main entrance, you begin to laugh.

Or is it Vriska that begins to laugh?

Same difference.

You’re packed to the brim with happiness, with joy, with all the hopes and dreams of everyone who listened to you. You want to explode with feeling, disappear into pleasure, help everyone who helped you get this far.

And she’s there, Vriska’s there, alive and in your head and you can feel every inch of her smile and laughter through the world around you, thousands of sepia toned airwaves bursting through your hair and oozing through your lips and flowing all through your mouth as you laugh and laugh. And you grab yourself, your body so insignificant, trying to keep yourself on the ground so you can say one thing before you become more. Before you finally turn into something you never knew you were craving all your life.

“Vriska,” you say, and it’s such a pain to do so. “You can have my body. It was always yours. I don’t need it anymore.”

You don’t wait for a response. You burst from your skin like water vapor.

Vriska fills the space you were in, her mind and personality possessing your old body. You bring Vriska up with your wind as she laughs and laughs in your voice, and you feel every shudder of her throat inside the air of your rapidly growing new body, feel her joy as if it was yours. And it is yours! You feel good too! You feel incredible, complete, more whole than you’ve ever felt in your life.

You “hear” something below you, something loud and old. You don’t hear it so much as feel it inside your tendrils of wind, feel Karkat’s voice hit you with such strange vibrations. You want to pull it apart and examine it and send it right back.

But then Vriska starts talking, and god, that’s even better. You can’t hear her without ears, but you can feel her words in your very self. You never thought being in someone’s mouth, being drawn through human lungs and used for a purpose, could make you feel so happy. You’re light as you flow through her, like your whole world is made of sunshine and warmth.

“Nice try, Karkat!” she yells over you, and when she exhales you, fuck, that’s like nothing you’ve ever felt before. “But John can’t hear you! He’s not flesh and blood anymore! He’s a storm! John is my might and my champion, and he is a god hand picked by Lady Luck herself! See-ya, suckers!”

Vriska holds out her arm, and you spiral around her and lift her up higher, further into your eye, as you grow and grow and swirl dark and long across the horizons. And you feel ecstasy, you feel electric as lightning rolls through your clouds, you feel full as rain desperately forms and falls in warm drops off your whole self. And Vriska, Vriska, your Vriska, she feels so good breathing you in, hugging herself like she wants to hold you, and you keep swirling around and around with her as the center, like she always was.

“John, my John,” she whispers, amidst her triumphant laughter. She’s so quiet against your roaring gray, but you can feel her nonetheless. “We did it! I knew we could do it! I’m so happy, we’re going to give this new world a show to remember. We’re going to make things so much better, you and I! This mortal coil won’t know what hit 'em, not our team, not our divinity. We will build this structure from the bottom up, make it good, make it right, just you and me.”

You can’t help but spill your happiness all across the sky. Electricity slithers across your whole self. Thunder roils through your massive being. Gales and winds and cyclones and electricity touch down into sea and city as you laugh with all your might, and where they touch, your happiness crashes down into the world.

Your name is John Egbert: The God of Storms, Winds, and Sound.

And you’ve finally become what you were meant to be all along.