Chapter Text
The machine towers over the humans and trolls, set against one wall of the room. Inorganic material is arranged organically; panels of hard, silver metal laid over each other like scales. Unmarked levers and switches stick out around lifeless screens. It’s large and mostly rectangular, with a long piece at the top that extends across the ceiling and very nearly over them.
Jade has been looking up at it with admiration and is the first to step forward. Kanaya stops her with a light touch to her arm. “I do not think that would be wise.”
“That’s weird.” For once John is frowning. “Everything else we’ve found has been old and dusty. This looks really clean.”
“Maybe, it’s been used,” Tavros offers hesitantly.
Karkat isn’t sure what to make of it, so he turns to the only one of them that might have some idea. “Sollux?”
He half-shrugs at Karkat, staring up at the machine like he expects it to move or start talking, offer up any clue to them what it is for. “It’th not Alternian, that’th all I can thay for thertain.”
“It’s not human, either,” Rose says and her voice is just a little too quiet.
Kanaya is looking at her and not the machine.
“That part of it,” Jade leans forward and gestures loosely, “is a lot like Grandpa’s transmaterializer. I’m not sure about that part, there, but if I had to guess I would say it has something to do with that bit over there, because they’re lined up with each other.”
“How do you mean?”
Karkat groans. “Oh for gog’s sakes, John, don’t encourage her!”
They ignore him and stand closer to each other, Jade pointing out what she was talking about to make sure that he can see. “A lot of machines are made like houses. If you have a square, that’s a room. Wires connect the rooms so that they can work together to make up the whole house. If a square isn’t doing anything, it’s like having a room that no one uses. It doesn’t make much sense and probably shouldn’t be there.”
John nods and Karkat face-palms.
“When I look at a machine like this, I look for the rooms and for the house as well. That’s how I can understand what it’s for and how to fix it when it breaks. With this one, that part there, that’s a square. And...oh, it might be getting a bit complicated here...it’s like a wall, and that part over there is the other wall. Little rooms inside big rooms, I guess.”
“Inside a house,” John says slowly.
She beams at him. “Yes.”
Karkat rubs his hand across his face. “Sollux, tell the humans why they’re wrong.”
“Thorry KK. It maketh a lot of thenth. Blockth and hiveth. It’th like the networkth I uthed to run, back on Alternia.”
Karkat growls in irritation and presses his face into both of his hands. Gamzee shuffles up behind him and paps him on the shoulder. “Cheer up motherfucker.”
“Those panels there, they’re just like windows,” John points out.
“Yes!” Jade claps her hands together. “And they look so, soo familiar! I just can’t remember where I’ve seen them before...somewhere back home, I think!”
Rose takes a small step back, unnoticed by anyone but Kanaya.
“But you can’t see through them.”
“Oh, you’re not meant to! Windows aren’t always for seeing-”
Rose takes another step back, then another, staring at the machine like it was something that she knew but had thought she’d lost. Her back presses gently to the wall and she puts her palms on it, spreading her fingers, staring, as Jade chatters on.
“-sometimes they’re for-”
The machine is completely still, but a light at the top of it flickers to life. Tavros lets out a sound of dismay but no one pays it any attention.
“-oh, I don’t know. Taking you places that you’ve never been-”
No one but Dave, who glances down at the troll and then up at the machine, pulling out a broken sword from his strife specibus when he sees the extended piece of it begin to move.
“-places that you want to, or would never think to go!”
“What is wrong, Rose?” Kanaya reaches out a hand to the girl, who is shuddering inexplicably.
Tavros wheels backwards and then stops, bracing himself and blushing, embarrassed for his own cowardice but determined to stand with the others, even if the metal arm was moving oddly and there was a chance that it would try to kill them in a moment.
Dave gives him a nod without taking his eyes from the machine.
The arm clicks, moving only inches and stopping before repeating the action.
“-but I’m just being silly. My grandson told me about it and he’s very nice, but a little dramatic!” Jade giggles.
They don’t hear Kanaya’s murmur of “Rose?”
“He sounds like a lot of fun,” John says with a wide smile.
The arm jolts and Dave braces himself to, he doesn’t know, fight off a laser or some shit. The good thing about fighting with broken swords was that you didn’t have to worry about them getting vaporised or whatever by machines that started moving when everyone was distracted by windows and it was just inconvenient. It wouldn’t be the first thing he’d wrecked since they’d started exploring the lab, but the other rogue machines were triggered – by Tav wheeling out onto the wrong bit of floor, by Vantas who thought every warning was a challenge, by heat, sound, light sensors.
This one just up and decided to dance like the sweetest beats were playing on a frequency only its robo-ears could hear and the only thing it was going to share with them was its own brand of interpretative dance. Slow like it’s prom night, he’s got his arm around some nice girl he desperately wants to take to a hotel after, and also jabbing like he’s going to fucking romance that mouse trap out of its cheese. It’s beautifully ironic. But as much as he appreciates it, Dave prepares himself to fuck its shit up.
Terezi is silent and expressionless. A part of Dave realises she’s never been quiet this long before, the whole time they’ve been on this floating rock. A part of Dave worries. Another, bigger part of him tells him to grip his sword tighter and make sure that she doesn’t get hurt. He’ll ask her later what she was thinking about.
“Shit, KK. I don’t know what it’th doing.”
Taking his hands away from his face, Karkat curses himself for putting them there in the first place. How could he have let his guard slip? He should have been paying attention, because Egbert and Harley weren’t, just yammering on to each other with those fucking grating human smiles, all blunt teeth and pity that hurt you because it didn’t mean anything. Like friendship was a disease they just wanted to infect everyone with, no matter if they had fucking better things to do, like keep the group from falling apart the way he knew it would if he didn’t keep such a close eye on it.
Gamzee’s got that lazy grin on his face as he pushes Karkat gently back and stands in front of him. “Might be getting all motherfucking dangerous up in here. You get your chill on, my best motherfucker.”
Karkat exchanges a look with Sollux, horrified where the other is grimly accepting.
“Rose, tell me what is wrong.”
“You’d really like him! Oh, what’s that?”
The arm jolts, whirs another few inches and jolts again.
Jade takes a step forward so that she can take a closer look at the machine. “I think that might be writing.”
“Rose should take a look at it,” John says and turns.
He sees Rose backed against the wall, Kanaya touching her shoulder like she’s afraid that she’ll break. Terezi not moving. Gamzee shielding Karkat who’s about to start pounding on the bigger troll’s back. Sollux touching his arms, Dave with his sword drawn, Tavros looking utterly scared and facing upwards.
And he understands that it was a mistake to come into this room.
And he looks up at the mechanical arm stretching out above him.
And he blinks.
Then grips Jade’s shoulder more forcefully than he ever would if they weren’t in immediate danger, not tightly enough to hurt but more than enough to get her attention and draw her away from the machine. She stumbles back into Terezi and he feels sorry that he used too much strength with her, but it doesn’t matter right now. The arm clicks and whirs, moving smoothly as if it is scanning the room. It rotates from one side to the other, again and again, too slowly to be anything but ominous.
Even as Karkat cries out in protest – telling him what an idiot he is, probably – John uses his powers to send a breath of wind up and past the arm, the light at the top of the machine blinking red erratically like a message in Morse code. Then he catches up a gust underneath his feet and flips up into the air, landing on the top of the console.
The arm folds up into itself so that it can point towards him, as if it can see him there. And he really hopes it doesn’t, or it will make him feel so awful for what he is about to do.
“EGBERT WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING GET THE FUCK DOWN HERE RIGHT THE FUCK NOW!”
John smiles to himself and his hammer drops into his hand. He pounds into the light because, gosh, red is never a good thing, and then again, hearing the crazed whirring of a machine too damaged to work properly.
“DON’T- YOU FUCKING MORON WHAT THE FUCK, HOW CAN YOU BE SO INCOMPREHENSIBLY STUPID-”
“Egbert are you sure you really want to get the robot all excited? I don’t want it pulling me into a mechanical samba down here, Tav’s nodding at me, yeah he’s not down with that either-”
The arm is still for a while before lunging forward at him. John dodges it pre-emptively, flipping back over himself and landing on the console again.
Someone cries out. He thinks it was Jade.
He pushes up just in time for another lunge then brings his hammer down on the arm with an audible crack. It jolts, twitching like he’d just doused it with water. Gosh, the end looked sharp. He hadn’t realised it. Almost like a needle...
“GAMZEE LET ME GO, YOU- ARGH!”
“Egbert that’th not enough to fry it! The thing ith huge, I don’t know where the thircuitboardth are. You don’t know where to hit. It’th not going to get any weaker, you’re jutht hitting a thcuttlebeatht until it thnapth at you!”
John considers that for a moment, then hammers into the base of the arm. It doesn’t do much, Sollux is probably right, but the metal bends in on itself from the force of the impact. He flies up and looks over the machine, trying to find a good place to attack.
The arm swings wildly after him then draws back almost to its original position.
He drives into one of the screens and sparks fly out, surprising him because he doesn’t know much about how computers work, but he thought that when they were turned off the electricity didn’t run through.
“THIS COUNTS AS A HEROIC DEATH, YOU ABSOLUTE FUCKING IDIOT! GET THAT THROUGH YOUR REDUNDANT THINK PAN AND SAVE US ALL THE TROUBLE OF WATCHING YOU GET YOURSELF KILLED IN THE STUPIDEST WAY POSSIBLE. JEGUS, YOU’RE LIKE A CLIMBINGBEAST UNFAMILIAR WITH AN APICULTURE NETWORK, JAMMING HIS HANDS INTO IT UNTIL THE BEES AMASS AROUND HIS NECK TO FATALLY WOUND HIM AND HE FALLS INTO A PUDDLE OF MIND HONEY-”
Two years living on this meteor with the trolls means that John is pretty good at ignoring Karkat’s angry ranting. His hammer crashes into one of the windows and he is actually a little sad to see it shatter and break. He wants to whistle but doesn’t think Karkat would appreciate that, not with the way he’s working himself up over John’s imminent death.
“You want some help up there, bro?”
John laughs breathlessly and hears Karkat scream a long, frustrated word that doesn’t make sense. “I’m okay! Thanks Dave.”
“Always got your back, man.”
He flips over the arm, looking back at it as he does...
...and that turns out to be a mistake, because the body of the machine is somehow closer than he thought, and as he tries to push off it the arm comes around and cuts into his chest, near his shoulder but not near enough for him to be sure that he’s going to be okay. His god tier clothes become quickly wet with blood and he blinks in stunned surprise for a second before sweeping himself up in his wind and lifting up and away from the thing that had wounded him. It doesn’t follow.
Red blood drips down his arm and off his fingers and it doesn’t hurt as much as John thinks it should. It feels like a cold burn, fire and ice at the same time, but he can block it out and still move so he’s probably okay, right? He stares down at the machine, floating in mid-air out of its reach. When he glances at the others Dave looks grim, Tavros terrified, Jade is crying and Karkat...his yellow eyes are staring numbly at something on the ground, one hand fisted into the back of Gamzee’s shirt.
John looks down. Ah. It’s the droplets of his blood. He curls his fingers into his palm to stop more blood from falling. That red is Karkat’s red. He feels sorry, so sorry that he is making the troll look at blood that could very well have been his own.
He takes his hammer into his hand, slicked with blood and harder to grip. Then he rushes down to the machine as fast as he can, wanting to close his eyes and feel dizzy and have the people he loves take care of him, but knowing that Dad isn’t here and he’s been injured before, killed before, he can’t be childish and give into it just because he wants to. Because he needs to finish what he started and hammer this thing into tiny little pieces.
“John, shit-” Dave cusses just loudly enough for him to hear.
“You can’t kill a computer jutht by hitting it!”
And he understands, really he does, but this seems like something that he has to do. For his friends. To keep them as safe as he wants them to be.
He’ll be all right. He’s always all right.
“Get your calm on, bro,” Gamzee is saying to a struggling Karkat. “Watch him break apart this motherfucker.”
“John...” Jade says painfully.
“JOHN!” The scream is so loud, blood-curdling, surprising enough to stop him in his tracks and turn his head quickly to the person that made it. Rose is shaking, tears running down her usually composed face, but she isn’t looking at him. She’s looking at the ground a way in front of her like there’s something there, but there isn’t, it’s confusing him-
The arm hits him brutally in the back, sending his body flying.
Gamzee is a big motherfucker, and he has a duty to the little motherfuckers to catch them when they ought to be all motherfucking up and catched. He takes a step forward and John is in his arms, lighter than a bottle of his wicked elixir, and he guesses that’s thanks to the windy thing he is all like to do. “It’s a motherfucking miracle,” he sighs down at the human he’s holding. John isn’t moving but that’s okay, they can chill out and just be as they motherfucking are. The red on his neck reminds him of his best friend, and Gamzee ain’t going to pass up an opportunity to taste him, so he leans forward and swipes his tongue over it.
His best friend puts his hand on his face and Gamzee licks it, just fucking grateful for all the miracles that are happening right now. They’re all coming together and bleeding and tasting and motherfucking doing what their hearts are all up and telling them, and Karkat’s fingers taste like his tears and it’s motherfucking beautiful. His best friend and the windy boy are going to confess their pity today and it’s beautiful and he is just the happiest motherfucker that ever motherfucking was.
“Jegus, just put him down you sick fuck.” Karkat is pale and his hands are shaking a little. If anyone asked why he’d tell them it was because his moirail had just licked them like they were candy. As close as they are there are some things about Gamzee that freak him right the fuck out.
“Is he okay?” Dave asks from where he has stayed standing, watching the damaged arm sway a little as it rotates from side to side, the way it had earlier.
That’s not a question Karkat wants to answer because it’s not a question he wants to ask in the first place. Blood is pouring out onto the floor and he doesn’t want to look at it. Doesn’t want to look at John either because he’s so pitiful, more red than blue now and if he weren’t so worried out of his goddamn mind for the idiot he’d be teasing Sollux about it.
Wants to look at John because he’s so pitiful it makes Karkat’s heart ache, twisting up until he begins to pity himself for pitying this human so much.
Gamzee’s humming and it should annoy the hell out of him but somehow from him it’s comforting. He wants to hold his hand and knows that he can, but he also wants to...bring John back to life, if he can, if that will even work. Karkat wants to lean in close and smell the blood on him, pity him even more for it – humans, so weak, so easily broken – touch their lips together so John can open his pathetic, strange blue eyes and realise how pitiful Karkat is for caring about him so much, and then...hell if he knows. Sloppy interspecies makeouts? – John should pity him for just wanting to go back on his law, whether he actually will or not.
Terezi’s pressing her face up close to his and sniffing. She bares her teeth but doesn’t laugh and Karkat scowls at her (a little tearfully, but he’ll never admit it). He puts up a hand quickly before she can lick at his tears and she licks it instead. “Ugh, what is the sudden fascination with licking my hand...”
“You won’t let me lick him.” She angles her head to John, both looking and sounding sad.
“No,” Karkat bites out, “I won’t.”
She bares her teeth again. He surprises himself by growling at her, deep in his chest. Terezi draws back a little, then hits him almost fondly across the back of the head. In a moment she’s gone and it’s just Karkat and John again, and deep, red rivulets of blood.
Kanaya gazes at them from where she is standing, unsurprised by what she sees and wondering if John is still alive. Her arm itches to go around Rose, but they are not moirails, merely friends, and she thinks the gesture would be unwelcome. Her red sentiment cannot be enough for two on its own, as much as she feels for the other girl. What can be held in one heart will never be enough for two.
Instead she runs her fingers lightly a short way down her shoulder, never increasing the pressure, never pulling away. Rose must know that she is there for her in whatever capacity she is wanted.
She cries prettily but she cries nonetheless. Rose is not unendingly strong, just as Kanaya is not unendingly patient. She thinks that they understand each other somehow. Perhaps not as much as she would like, but enough. Rose has not moved since she last cried out, her eyes hazed over from a vision. Kanaya pities her for having to see what happened before it did and hopes she will not have to be the one to tell her that she caused it.
John is lying on the ground where Rose had been looking a minute ago. It was an unfortunate prophecy that, in the revealing of it, caused itself to become truth.
Rose’s eyes clear and she looks at John with emotion in her eyes that hurts Kanaya to see. Her fingers stop moving though they do not pull away. Then her Rose looks over to Gamzee, standing away from his moirail and watching him with a delighted smile on his face. As they watch, together, the forgotten, winding arm of the machine spikes down and tears at his arm.
Dave gets two hits in before the arm retracts, cursing at it once, which is more of a loss of control than they are accustomed to from him.
Not seeming to feel the pain of the bloody gash, Gamzee looks at it mildly and puts his hand over it, taking it away to see the patchy violet stain of his blood, then putting it back again.
Karkat stares at him, clearly uncertain whether he should care for his moirail or potential matesprit when both of them are injured.
Above them the arm rotates. Clicks. Rotates. Stops. Clicks. Clicks again. The light on the top of the machine goes green. They watch it warily, somehow understanding that what is about to happen is both unwelcome and not physically dangerous. Dave’s weapon is held more loosely at his side and Tavros wheels closer to him.
Karkat doesn’t give a shit about any of that because Gamzee is nodding at him, telling him that it’s all right to take care of John now. For one thing Gamzee is so out of it he doesn’t seem to even feel what’s been done to him. For another John is much more likely to be dead.
When his eyes flutter open Karkat could freaking kiss him just from the relief. His mouth shapes words that aren’t spoken. John stares up at Karkat with his weird alien eyes and says, “Oh.”
The arm stops. Rotates. Stops. Rotates a much shorter distance. Stops. Clicks. Rotates. Like it’s honing in on someone. Because that is exactly what it is doing. Rotates. Stops. Rotates.
Tavros fumbles for Dave’s hand and Dave looks down at it, visibly surprised, surprising people that Dave Strider is for once visibly anything other than completely cool. Tavros doesn’t seem to notice and keeps staring up at the big frightening metal thing that might be about to kill one or both of them.
Terezi shifts her feet.
Rose pulls away from Kanaya’s hand. She is crying again, looking at the broken window.
Sollux rubs at his eyes, cursing that his vision isn’t as good since he was un-blinded. He can’t quite see the arm because it is moving too quickly for him to easily focus on.
The arm rotates and stops and stays stopped.
John feels numb, but he knows he’s injured. It wasn’t enough to kill him or really hurt him, because quite honestly once you’d died you were pretty much set for not feeling too bad about pain for the rest of forever. There was always something to compare it to which made it seem better, easier. He’d survived a lot worse. He was always all right.
His eyes look up into Karkat’s, seeing the tears in them, feeling his arm supporting some of his weight, the warmth of his body pressed against his side. And god, it feels weird. This was the weirdest thing that had happened since Karkat’s weird kissmess thing. It sort of seemed like the guy was playing around with him.
‘John, be my weird hate-thing. What, you said no? This is kind of super awkward. Let me go back and make you friends with me by being ridiculously stupid-charming. When we meet I’ll yell at you a lot and also ask you to watch movies with me, and then I’ll yell at you during the movies and maybe sometimes smile just to mess up your head a bit. Are we friends? No, who would be friends with an idiot human like you, John Egbert! Are we kissmesses?' Not even an answer for that, because it turns out John had no idea what the whole thing really meant. 'Gamzee is my moirail! I’m going to kiss him on the cheek all the time to make you unsure what’s really going on! Then when you get hurt and come to afterwards I’m going to be holding you like I lo...love you more than anything in the entire world, and look at you like you are the entire world, and not swear or yell or anything for a whole, like, minute because my name is Karkat and I just like confusing the shit out of you when you’ve lost a lot of blood.”
As if to illustrate his point, Karkat sort of leans forward and touches John lightly on the face. He makes a small noise, though he’s not sure why he did it or what it meant. All he can do – he has lost a lot of blood, after all – is look at Karkat’s grey red-tinged eyes and think, more than ‘god his eyes are so alien-y’, ‘god, I wish I’d been close enough to see them before’. And he’s not sure why he thought that or what it means.
Karkat leans in closer, running his fingers along John’s lip and looking a bit like he’s trying not to cry, and it’s sad to see because Karkat is usually too strong for tears, the last one of them to cry about anything, even with Gamzee. And he knows because Gamzee tells him everything about Karkat, so John is pretty sure he knows Karkat rather well. There’s not a doubt in his mind that Karkat is screwing with him right now.
So when his fingers slide over his mouth John pokes out his tongue and licks them.
Karkat freezes and stares at him, then at his hand.
“Oh jegus fuck you are the third person to do that, what the fuck is everybody on today, are you just all fucking drinking sopor or eating the fucking mind honey when my back is turned, gog almighty-”
John has no idea what he’s talking about but Karkat’s face is funny so he begins to, painfully, laugh.
A bright light builds up at the end of the arm, funnelling out from the body of the machine. Dave mutters something about lasers.
When it is fired it tears past him and everyone else, shot straight into an oblivious, laughing John, who is caught up in the light and immediately disappears.
The arm drops and the light goes off on the machine.
Karkat is still sitting with his hand raised in disgust and it takes him a minute and Gamzee actually pulling him up to stand before he realises that John is gone. He stares at his hand, with blood and saliva on it, and shakily wipes it on Gamzee’s shirt. The other troll doesn’t seem to mind.
In contrast, Kanaya realises immediately that this was what Rose had seen. Not John becoming wounded, but John vanished at the whim of an as of yet unfamiliar and unpredictable machine. She cannot bear to touch her shoulder and steps away. Rose gives her a faint smile.
Terezi is frowning blatantly, sniffing the air. “I can’t smell John.”
“He’s gone.” Dave’s voice is oddly hollow and his statement has the touch of a question.
Jade falls onto Tavros and they hug as she sobs uncontrollably.
“Holy shit. KK, are you okay?”
Instead of swearing Karkat is shaking. When Gamzee draws him in so that his face is pressing into his chest he doesn’t say anything. The humming starts up again, a gesture of comfort that is so out of place, but Karkat sinks into him, bloodied hands clenching in the fabric of his shirt like he wants to fight but all he can do is cry.
“What kind of machine is this?” Kanaya’s voice is calm but her thoughts are disjointed.
“John’s gone somewhere, John’s gone somewhere and I don’t know where he is. I’m meant to know but I don’t, he’s just not here and he should be, this wasn’t meant to happen. That machine, it’s a transmaterializer but that’s just a little part of it. It’s taken John. He’s not here anymore. It would be worse, god, so much worse if he was somewhere we would never find him, living on his own. I almost… I almost wish...” Jade makes a wretched sound.
Her feelings go suddenly from grief to anger. She pushes away from Tavros and screams at the machine more loudly than any of them had thought her capable of. “GIVE HIM BACK! Give him back, you no-good lousy piece of shit!”
Unsurprisingly, it does not respond.
Jade screams a nearly inhuman sound and raises her hands, eyes a brighter green behind her glasses. She lashes out at the air in front of her as if fighting an invisible enemy. The arm of the machine crushes in on itself, twists, folds and breaks off from the body, falling to the ground.
“Jade!” Kanaya calls to her.
“Jade, thtop! We can’t know what’th happened if you dethtroy it!”
Her hand stops, fingers curled like she’s scrunched up a piece of paper, and the machine wavers as she does, trembling until she screams again in frustration and lowers her arms. For a moment her body is stiff with uncharacteristic rage. Then her knees bend and she falls to the ground, crying to herself.
With wide eyes and half-pressed into Gamzee’s shoulder, Karkat murmurs something the others can’t make out. Gamzee pats him heavily on the back.
“What happened?” Terezi asks, the person who has interacted with John the least over the last two years. It’s clear she doesn’t know how to react.
In an instant Dave is standing differently, a little further away from Tavros. He turns his head to Rose expectantly.
“Where is he?” Tavros’ voice is soft.
“On Alternia.”
Each of them turns to Rose, who smiles as benevolently as a Seer really ought to before she divulges plot-centric information.
“...what the fuck?” Sollux says finally.
Terezi sniffs at her. “Alternia is gone.”
“Yes. But none of us can plaintively deny that it once existed. A planet lost in a universe abandoned, far beyond the reach of human fingers. Destroyed now, but once for feet to tread. And this machine is even more complex than I have come to expect from this place.”
“Ditch the routine for once, Lalonde. None of this looking into glass balls, ‘I see a tall dark stranger and he wants to get in your pants’ bullshit. Tell us what happened to my bro.”
Rose frowns slightly at him.“Very well, Dave. I’ll depart with my air of intrigue for the moment. Though you best of all of us should realise that if we have anything now, it is time.”
“Is that what you are saying? John went back to Alternia?” Kanaya is a little breathless and her words set off the other trolls.
“Oh fuck no. He’ll be dead in thecondth.”
Terezi just cackles like the psychopath they all sort of suspect her to be.
Karkat pushes away from Gamzee. “What? You mean that machine can take us back?”
“Whatever ideas you’re having, get rid of them immediately,” Rose says, narrowing her eyes. “We’re here for a reason. John, it seems, is there for a reason. Any reality where you attempt to use the machine for your own perceived benefit leads to a doomed timeline. It doesn’t work that way, and it oughtn’t, because he has gone back to a time when you and your friends lived on Alternia. Attempting to send yourself or any other troll back would result in a paradox.”
“Why is he there?” Kanaya asks quietly.
“That end will reveal itself.”
“Rose, I said no bullshit.”
She inclines her head. “Knowing what is likely to eventuate is occasionally tedious. I resort to flowery language to make it more interesting for myself.”
“John...” Karkat’s voice is weak.
“Yes. He’s quite safe – well, as safe as one can be on Alternia,” Rose amends. “It’s not a very welcoming place.”
“Shut up. It made us stronger,” he says gruffly.
“Oh, I have no doubt it did that. Though I wonder if John will see it the same way.”
Jade gets shakily to her feet. “Rose, what’s happened to him. What’s going on.”
The air around Rose seems to darken as she raises her hands, palms-up, and the corner of her mouth quirks in an unsettling imitation of a smile. “Yes,” she says and it’s almost a hiss. “I have seen it. Not the future, though we all may consider it as that, but the past, for the first time with such clarity. I can still feel the searing heat of the sun in my vision, the biting wind, the language of animals in my bones, never as weak and fragile and human as at that time, in that place, where I truly felt myself to be. Where John was and is now. Alternia.
“This piece of machinery compelled him there, back and in a changed body. At a level beyond our god-tier powers, possessed only by science or perhaps nature, for now I have seen nature do incredible things. It sent John through time and space, to before his own, second birth on a planet we can only know to be different from Earth, but which he will have to understand.”
The light strands of her hair have lifted away from her skin as she speaks. The whites of her eyes are somehow brighter, even as the air darkens, reminding them of the time she had gone grimdark. No one is able to raise their voice to her.
“John.” She closes her eyes and the fingers of one hand curl. “Born again.” The fingers of her other hand curl. “In a foreign land.” She tilts her head to the side. “In a foreign body.” Her head tilts to the other side. “But still John.” She sighs. “Our John.” Her eyes open.
“And he will grow in his own time, while we watch him, here. And perhaps, one day, he will be with us again.”