Chapter Text
At first, you spend most of your time on the meteor third-wheeling. Your sister is in pretty hardcore lesbians with Kanaya right from the get-go, and Terezi seems to be doing something similar with Vriska. This doesn't stop you from hanging out with them and generally needling them, but it gets old pretty fast. You can't say you're surprised when Rose finally snaps at you and sends Kanaya to apologize the next day. Vriska’s much more openly hostile from the start, and you discover pretty quickly that even with Terezi’s influence she's not above doing some pretty drastic shit to you to get you to leave.
It works, to say the least.
From then on, you hang around the Mayor in Can Town, which has the unfortunate side effect of placing you in relatively close proximity to Karkat, in your opinion the worst troll, second only to Vriska. He’s loud and grating, always shouting about some asinine topic or another, and for whatever reason he absolutely hates you. You don’t really care, you think he’s funny as hell, but being the constant subject of someone’s ire is both tiresome and familiar for reasons you don’t want to think about.
So one day, after a heated Vantas-patented rant about fuck knows what begins with no end in sight, you just get up, turn on your heel, and walk out. You already weren't in the mood. Vriska was hanging around you weirdly that morning. It put you on edge, sent a snake of tension up your spine to bite down in the meat at the back of your neck.
You wander the meteor aimlessly. Once upon a time, Terezi and Vriska were trying to map out the entire lab, but all they really achieved was discovering that there was more lab than actual meteor, and leaving a few obnoxiously colored drawings around, before it gets too deep. Right now, you’re long past any of these drawings. It’s just you and the dark and the creaking noises of the lab, absolutely none of which are honks. Nope. No honks here, no ominous murderclowns who are supposed to be trapped in a fridge but how are you really supposed to know, since you can’t open the fridge to check, and besides if he’s so strong and murder-y what’s to stop him from escaping anyway?
Okay. Maybe you’re freaking out a little bit. It’d probably help if you weren’t in one of these legendary endless staircases, so you lift off the ground and fly to the bottom and duck into the first room you see.
Not ideal, you think, looking around at the cavernous space, but still an improvement. In the center of the room are a few massive slime-filled jars containing more mutant beasts, and around it are scattered several humanoid-looking things in jars. Trolloid? Trollian? Karkat would know, but fuck him.
Holyshitdidthatonemove.
No. There’s no way it just moved. It’s a dead (right? it is dead?) humanoid trolloid mutant thing in a tube of green slime. You shuffle closer anyway, just to make sure.
Oh fuck. Ohhhh fuck it definitely twitched. But you aren’t really sure, because the slime is really murky and this room is really dark (although it’d be less dark if you took off your shades, but fuck that noise). It’s not, like, very big or anything. Shit, if it’s alive, that means it’s trapped. It’s probably weak as fuck from being in this jar for however long, too.
Emboldened by this train of thought, you gently rap on the glass with your knuckles.
Or at least. You try, but another you appears from the future and tackles you out of the way.
DAVE: jesus christ dude what the fuck
DAVE: dont touch that fuckin thing dude
DAVE: okay jeez
DAVE: but shit i thought we were done with time travel though and now youre makin me finish your loop
DAVE: fuck you man
DAVE: trust me bro youd rather complete one last loop than go through what i went through
DAVE: though its not like youre gonna have to
DAVE: oh fuck
DAVE: youre doomed
DAVE: yeah
You stare at the other you in shock. What the hell could happen to make you purposely doom your own timeline?
DAVE: what the fuck happened
DAVE: well
DAVE: this
He whips out his sword and you stumble backwards, but he doesn’t bring it anywhere near you. Instead he slashes the glass container you’d been poking around and just stands there as the green slime and broken glass cascades into him, like he’s sacrificing himself or some bullshit.
You suppose he is.
He turns his head and speaks.
DAVE: dont touch the slime
Eventually he’s bowled over and trapped in the slime. You turn away, and a few minutes later look back at his limp form.
You hate cleaning up bodies.
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It takes a pathetically long time to realize that Dave is gone when he disappears. You assume he’s with Rose, who assumes he’s with you, and nobody else sees him enough to wonder where he is even when they don’t see him for days.
When you do collectively notice his absence, you immediately head a search party and personally scour the meteor for any signs of Dave.
You finally realize where he’s gone when you wake up one morning and see that Rose’s eyes are blank white.
KARKAT: HE WENT BACK.
KARKAT: I CAN’T BELIEVE HE DIDN’T FUCKING TELL ME.
ROSE: Yes, I’m unhappy with him as well.
ROSE: I guess the only way to find him now is to search the other dreambubbles.
KARKAT: FUN.
You lose track of Vriska and Terezi pretty quickly, but you, Rose, and Kanaya stick together to look for Dave. Or, “your Dave,” as you now have to specify, because you meet tons of other Daves. There’s plenty of other yous and Roses and Kanayas but even you rarely fall into the trap of a self-argument, because you need to find Dave.
It becomes a bit of an obsession for you and Rose. Kanaya seems concerned sometimes, but she never tries to stop you or slow you down, and she helps as best she can.
The second thing you lose track of almost right away is time. Not that it matters now, you suppose, but you forget how long you’ve been dead and can’t tell if it’s meant to be day or night. Different dreambubbles are frozen at different times of day, and you don’t need to sleep anymore, so you have no sense of how long you’ve been searching besides “ages.”
You’re also not the only ghosts looking for someone, and far from the only group looking for a version of Dave. You meet individual yous, Roses, and Terezis on desperate hunts for their own Daves, and even plenty of Daves looking for their own yous, Roses, and Terezis. Every time you run into one of them you have almost the same exact conversation.
KARKAT: ARE YOU OUR DAVE?
DAVE: what happened to us
KARKAT: YOU TURNED INTO A TROLL.
DAVE: what the fuck
DAVE: definitely not sorry
DAVE: youre all from the same timeline arent you
KARKAT: YUP.
DAVE: well see you then
KARKAT: BYE.
Sometimes the Dave stays with you a bit longer, asking questions about how certain things went down in your timeline. Occasionally you’ll run into one who’s surprised to find out the pair of you dated, but most of them either also dated you in their timelines or have just heard it from enough Daves that it isn’t a surprise anymore.
And then you see a Dave sitting in a dreambubble of a room that looks a lot like The Lab.
DAVE: what was your timeline
KARKAT: YOU TURNED INTO A TROLL.
His head shoots up.
DAVE: no shit
DAVE: karkat
DAVE: rose holy fuck
DAVE: you found me
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