[i'm gonna throw another charlie brown drawing at you for that pun i stg]
[he doesn't really have anything to say to that, though. it's true that he's used music as something of a means of escape, building a place to be surrounded by good vibes, attaching himself to something he loves to forget everything he hated about his life back home. but after a while, the fact that a song is meant to play that role becomes attached to it, too, which is souring in its own way.]
[maybe that's just another reason why he spends so much time remixing everything.]
[Dave stretches his legs out, sinking just slightly against the wall. he's not upset; if anything, he's relaxing, finding a comfort in the fact that there's just one more idea they both seem to value, one more thing they've got in common. and, he's just listening.]
Thanks, by the way. For letting me listen. [embarrassing shit and all. you can tell a lot about a person from the music they keep handy. even the Ponyo song carried a lot of meaning that was easily gleaned.]
Might be biased over here, but I'm thinking you got one of the best ghost gifts so far, easily. It even edges out the monkey pajamas.
You're thankin' me? [A small turn of his lips upward in response to that- he thought it was pretty obvious that there didn't need to be thank yous or your welcomes to this sort of thing, but he'll allow it. Hell, he'll even knock shoulders with Dave to reinforce the sarcasm here. It's no big deal. Or maybe it is kind of a deal, indeterminate in size, but Ryuji's chill enough with... whatever this is, really. It's just a Saturday night (every night's a weekend here), almost like he was back in Tokyo in his little cramped bedroom. The familiarity of everything here makes the artificial walls feel less cold and lifeless.
He lets out a throaty hnn..., a vestige of his own native language used when you're basically agreeing with something, but the economy of words needed to do so was strong enough to be conveyed by a sound rather than a spoken something instead. He gets to thinking about home for a moment, and rather than the normal levels of homesickness that it implies, he starts wondering some hypotheticals. If Dave were back there, and he was, and if they had known each other, what would this look like? Would it be different? Would they have gotten close like this or was everything just perpetuated by the situational morass that the terminal had to offer? Would he be trying to stifle down the way he feels about him?
He lets his head lean up against the wall behind him. Even in simple things there are layers of complexity if you go deeper into the things that make them up. But might as well talk about it rather than play around with the idea of talking about it.]
You think you'd ever... uh. Wanna see Tokyo one day? I mean. Like. Hypothetically speaking. I know it's kinda dumb to think gettin' off this station's happenin' anytime soon. But I'd wanna take you to an arcade. Or maybe one of those music halls where DJ's spin music live time.
[it's a big deal to him, at least — but, he receives that message behind the shoulder bump, and just barely refrains from returning with an equally sarcastically reinforced elbow to the ribs. yeah, yeah, he gets it!]
[hypotheticals aren't a bad thing to throw out there, though, not when reality isn't much of a picnic. at least, the scenario laid out on the floor between them is pretty nice. it's lots better than the one running through Dave's head for a minute or two.]
[how would this even work? how could he even explain the effort it'd take to meet outside the confines of this space station? "here, Ryuji, just go down for a nap, and if the stars and stupidfuck whimsies of space-time align, if the horrorterrors even allow for someone not playing Sburb to have a dream bubble, you'll pop up in the exact corner of Paradox Space where I am. and then, I'll have to wait for you to realize that you're just dreaming. and then, I dunno, guess we'll go apeshit until you wake up."]
[would he even buy that? moreover, would Ryuji even be willing to go through that effort for him?]
[best not to think about it right now.]
Yeah, I wouldn't mind seeing it. I'm interested in trying ramen that isn't just the packets you pull out of the toilet.
[Who knows? A .0000001% chance is still better than a zero sum game, but dreams are pretty fickle. How fucking depressing it would be to realize that if they left this station, the only chance they'd be able to do this sort of thing would have to be in the simulated environment of a dreamscape? And even then, of course hypothetically speaking, what would make Ryuji believe that it was actually happening and that it wasn't some sort of wish fulfillment going on. You can't project consciousness into a dream, it would just be a reflection of what he thought would happen- or so he'd believe.
Better to just deal with easier what-ifs, then. Without space time paradoxes, or the unlikelihood of whether or not it would be feasible; forget about logistics. Just things he'd like to show Dave, places he'd take him. Some giant ceramic cow in front of a cheese shop. Yoyogi Park. Shinjuku. Hell, Roppongi, if he wanted to jeer at the hoity toity ins and outs of the spendthrifts of the ridiculously luxurious.
Or just his favorite ramen shop, a little hole in the wall that he discovered and brought his whole track team to, filling out every seat of the bar as they slurped down hot noodles until their throats burned in a competitive streak of who could be fastest on the circuit and in the dining room. The comment gets a rise out of him as he looks over at Dave. Changes the song to something worse, more embarrassing; an anime theme song, because why the hell not? He gets to get the 360 experience of Ryuji Sakamoto after all.]
The good stuff. You know, where there's this little old lady at the back of the shop who hasn't washed her sauce pot in decades and that's where they make the bone broth! [Somehow that's sanitary... somehow- like the heat is always kept at such a high point that it never allows bacteria to seep in.] It'd be fun. Or... you know, there's this train ride you take and you try out all the curries of the local areas you stop. I ain't really ever been out in the country much, so it'd be new for the both of us!
[Oh, right, language. He laughs- it'd be funny to try and watch him interact with people. Almost as bad as his own interaction back in the states on his trip to Hawaii.]
Eh, I'd teach you some stuff. And the stuff you don't know? Don't worry, your boy's gotchu.
[he has to admit, the idea of visiting a bunch of (apple?) curry shops out in the middle of Nowhere, Japan, sounds pretty appealing. maybe they'd be like some of the barbecue spots in Houston, homemade and intimate, where your order was called out to the chefs in the form of an underhanded insult, and after you were done stuffing yourself with barbecue, there was a bowl of Blue Bell waiting so you could hurt yourself just a little more. it's the true Texas experience.]
[also, Dave bungles English badly enough on his own that he'd have an absolutely terrible time communicating with non-native speakers. though, maybe that's exactly why Ryuji finds the idea so funny.]
[... heh. bung.]
All right, but I'll be leaving wholly dissatisfied if I don't know every single rude word by the time the visit's over.
Anyway, trains weren't really a big thing in Houston — at least, I never knew anybody who used 'em. Most people just drove themselves everywhere.
[that is to say, he's never been on one before. there's a wealth of hypotheticals there, experiences that'll probably never happen, but it's kind of nice to talk about them anyway. sort of like mutually imagining that they're somewhere much better than the only options they actually have, with the added bonus of being there together.]
[Dear god, you can't go around as a foreigner in Tokyo spitting out insults like that and not either--
Wait. He's not Japanese. They'd probably laugh and think it was hilarious. Hell, Ryuji kind of wants to hear him rip out a meaty surprise of "YOU!" in that rude way that gets peoples' attention.]
Yeah. Goes without sayin'. You'd probably pick up half the bad shit from me alone anyway. [He didn't just earn the nickname "vulgar boy" ending phrases in politeness, he almost always used informal contexts, even when talking to people that should've been shown respect. But he doesn't have respect for people in the world who don't respect him, and it was kind of... cringe worthy sometimes, to be honest.
And maybe because it's Dave and he doesn't care as much what his mind is getting at around him, but he can't contain himself, nor his smile for very long. Yeah, he'd ride a train in Houston. Even eat some green eggs and ham if it came down to it. Shit, doing it with Dave would probably be 80% of the fun anyway. But there's a burning question he (with much cultural insensitivity) he has first---]
[he'd do it without hesitation, too, going off only his lack of context for the situation and also probably Ryuji's reassurances that it'd be funny. and it would be — there's not a whole lot that sounds better than the idea of wreaking havoc in a brand new city, especially alongside someone he likes.]
[what they're doing right now is pretty high up there on the list, too, though. embarrassing anime intro themes and all.]
[anyway, guess i'm buying this getup for Dave next. it can live in the cupboard with the monkey pajamas, never to be worn by their respective owners, right up until they do actually wear them. and it will be good.]
[Dave's expression is as flat and serious as ever, and with all the air of someone who's about to drop a few sentences that's a mix of both truth and complete bullshit. can Ryuji spot his tell? it's the way the corners of his mouth upturn the tiniest, tiniest fraction.]
Absolutely. There may, in fact, even be tens of them. Someone's gotta wrangle all the emus.
[Wow, Dave is actually going to be a dude at the dude ranch. And lord knows, maybe both those horrible outfits will end up burning down in a ring of fire that even Cash himself wouldn't pine lyrically over. (Ryuji would probably think he looks cute like that though, not even going to lie.)
Does he fall for it? Hell yeah, he does. At least at first. He has no idea how big Houston actually is, but he reckons it's somewhere between a one horse saloon like in those old timey macaroni westerns and a sprawling metropolis. Look, this is the kid who thought LA was the capital, leave it up to his imagination and he's bound to mess it up. His mouth goes open wide. Cowboys are real, huh? That's pretty damn awesome.
Wait a second. This seems fishy.]
You're really gonna think I'd fall for that? C'mon, there's gotta be more than tens of them if there are that many emus just wanderin' around the place.
[Is he playing with Dave back or is he being sincere? Who knows. It works both ways.]
[the humor is in the ambiguity. and that's exactly the way he likes it.]
Okay, fine, there's twenties of them. And that's at the absolute maximum.
[you know what they say about the dude ranches. it's a little wild and a little strange, when you make your home out on the range — because there's whole herds of emus out there, apparently.]
[this is getting kind of silly. Dave didn't really hear much of the last song, either, but even as a kid who is pretty much obsessed with hearing new music, he doesn't seem all that bothered by it.]
[I can't believe we've gone both Salute Your Shorts and Hey Dude directions in the span of one thread, but those man-eating emus out there, man, you better watch out for them. Tune in next week for an episode of Dave Explains It All.]
Yeah, I mean... any more and you'd have warring clans of ho-downs and rodeo shows, and then Houston-chan would probably fall off into the ocean from the thunderous quakes of all the square dancing going down.
[He'll hit play on the next song, and then leave it up to shuffle to decide his fate from here on out. Considering the fact that Ryuji doesn't have the slightest clue what square dancing actually looks like, he just assumes it's a deadly art form that he was never meant to learn or capture the essence of. He'll stick to his whipping and his nae-nae'ing, which is probably close. Or something like that.]
[they're good references, Bront!! but that last one isn't really inaccurate, either; Dave's basically just the 2000s version of Sam, minus the polite part.]
Toss a few hootenannies in there and you've more or less got an accurate picture of how it'd go.
[rest in peace, Houston-chan. drowned in the Gulf of Goofy Jokes About Texas Stereotypes.]
If we're talking hypotheticals, though, I wouldn't mind showing you some of the places where I used to like hanging out. Not just Houston.
He has no idea what Dave is going on about, which, okay, that's definitely not something that has ever happened before, right? Accurate pictures be damned.]
Tch. 'Wouldn't mind~', and here I was practically about to shove your ass into an arcade and win you one of those dumb overstuffed radish toys that everyone is always obsessed with.
[He's smiling though, clearly a lack of intentional hurt behind his tone, and he's curious. What sort of places is he talking about? He doesn't have the greatest picture of Dave's home, hell, as of right now it's just rife with cliches that he's seen in movies or something like that, and even then... did he mean places that he wound up after he started playing his game? There's so much Ryuji wants to know about him, and only if he had the mental wherewithal to compile a list of sorts, instead of just spitballing questions whenever they popped up.]
[it is taking everything Dave has in him to not laugh at the hootin' nannies. because he does, in fact, know one. and, it's not really working; he raises the shades with the back of his hand to palm at his eyes, then just sort of holds his hand over his mouth in that way someone does when they're stifling their laughter.]
[you win this round, Sakamoto.]
They're hooting and competitive knitting, obviously. Makin' stuffed radishes for you to win in a round of DDR, or whatever.
Anyway, there's a record shop back in Houston that I really always liked. There's always my planet, too, if you're a fan of endless miles of lava, gears, and those crocodiles I mentioned earlier.
[maybe ... not the whole of his apartment, if they were to hypothetically visit, but just his room. that's safe, right? even if he'd sort of had a nervous breakdown last time he was in there, it's still very much a reflection of who he is. or who he always sort of wanted to be.]
[plus, the toilet that's still sitting there would be amusingly relevant. Dave would say that's just where he gets all his great ideas.]
I'd really want you to meet my friends, too, though. I keep getting the feeling that y'all would like each other.
[This a seriously buck wild conversation, but Ryuji's gotten close enough to know that a planet made out of lava, gears, and particularly yappy crocodiles is probably just another every day occurrence. No big deal. He'd like to visit that too, honestly. Stand at the edge of the planet and throw a ring into the molten abyss, feel accomplishment at completing this horribly nerdy cliche, and call it a day. Any place that's not the station sounds pretty damn chill to be in, even if that chill place is a nice and balmy fire wasteland.]
Like the type of place that sells LPs? Sounds cool. The best part about that is always flippin' through and seein' all the cover art. They got more room, so they can really go all out. [A steady Jazz resurgence all over Tokyo in the past decade has turned some of those old record stores into a hipster paradise, but there were definitely some hole-in-the-wall type places that still existed where it didn't feel like its style was eternally cramped by salarymen coming in and grabbing stuff up to try and hitch onto the bandwagon.
The toilet would be all types of amusing though. Why did the shitter have such significance to all things Dave and Ryuji? This wasn't supposed to happen, I swear.]
Yeah, you think so? Shit, I'd have to make a good impression. Make sure I cut this mop off, clean up my jumpsuit, shower a little extra hard. [Joking, really, he probably wouldn't do any of that.] You've met like, half my friends already. I uh. I hope you like 'em. They're all good peeps.
[that's fair enough — Ryuji could make the nerdy gesture standing next to Dave, whose last name is Strider, and who wields snapped swords for a living, thereby also making him a walking Lord of the Rings reference. it all works on multiple levels.]
Yeah. [that's an answer to both questions. Dave's music library is largely digital, on account of not always having the extra change to spend on physical records, but he did always enjoy at least browsing.]
[and yeah, he does like Ryuji's friends — and in this yarn of what-ifs they're spinning, he can't help but wonder how meeting everyone he knows would actually go down. his friends are a huge mess of very strong personalities, but ... that doesn't really seem too far off from what he knows about the Phantom Thieves, either.]
Wouldn't worry too much about making a good first impression, though. They'll probably think you're weird, but that's pretty much the one qualifying trait they're looking for in friendship. You'd fit right in.
You're gonna have to meet the mayor, too. [Dave's favorite thing about Sburb ever.]
[It's strangely intimidating to want to ingratiate yourself to a group of friends that he's never met; moreso that they're Dave's friends. Sure, he always has a little bit of well hidden anxiety in him that keeps him constantly moving and shifting between his feet to keep occupied, but Ryuji would want to hang with them, too. He knows how deeply influenced by his own friends he's become- Makoto got him to study more, Ren got him to open up, Haru showed him that not everything that looks delicate is- the list goes on and on; he's curious to see what watermarks Dave's friends left on him too. He already has a pretty high opinion of him, so he can imagine they're also equally great people to be around. Again, just swimming around in a sea of hypotheticals here, it was equally likely and unlikely that something like that could even happen.]
I like how you just low key called me weird. [He doesn't let him off the hook on that one, though. It's kind of true though, isn't it? Ryuji can't really be that offended. He's spent so long being around the same people, that it always felt like he was just being himself. The more people he meets on the station, the more he sees that he's an exception to the rule, not the norm. Sometimes Ryuji forgets how much of a complete loner he was for the years that led up to starting the Phantom Thieves.]
Oh yeah. You mentioned that guy before. [And here he was, putting 2 and 2 together a little bit more.] I'm gettin' the sense that we're not talkin' about the mayor of Houston.
Right, he's the mayor of Can Town. I tried to build a Reverie annex a few times, but someone kept cleaning it up.
[that ... hm. that probably doesn't make any goddamn sense out of context. then again, when has anything Dave ever said made sense out of context?]
[he falls silent for a minute, just listening to whatever's playing. letting the rhythm resonate. he's a lot more relaxed than he figures he ought to be, considering not too long ago they were both navigating probably the most awkward attempt at flirting that has ever been witnessed in this particular patch of space. maybe that's just how safe of a thing music is to him. Dave sort of feels like he could fall asleep right there on the floor.]
I haven't told you much of anything about the meteor, huh.
[or try to talk about himself a bit more. it isn't that he hasn't wanted to, he's just so hilariously bad at it — afraid of acknowledging a lot of it, rather. maybe he can figure out something more to say than jokes about hollering grandmas or emu ranches.]
Dave, I have no effin' clue what the hell you're sayin'.
[Yeah, pretty much right on the nose with that assumption there. And he's perfectly fine with ragging on him about it, comfortable in his own way of being fond of the bullshit that he runs with.
It is kind of cool, though. If Dave were a jigsaw puzzle, Ryuji gets a little piece every now and then, and sometimes the parts fit on opposite ends of the greater picture. And if Dave is worried that the jumbled up image that comes out of that is one that he doesn't like, this loser over here would protest that to the very end. There hasn't been a single thing between them that Ryuji didn't find himself liking more and more as time went on, and god, he's doomed to live out his days with these awkward feelings that he just doesn't know how to act on.
But, that's not what's on his mind at the moment as music wafts between their shared space. Mostly, just curiosity.]
Nah, not really. [Head up against the wall, his tone shifts a little more away from joking.] Tell me about it.
[it might be starting to sound like this mayor doesn't actually have the credentials Dave is building him up with. which is flat-out wrong, of course; the guy has a sash that says mayor on it — what other credentials do you even need?]
If I'm gonna get into Can Town itself, and ... everything else, though, I guess I'd need to start toward the beginning.
[and he's already turning the details over and over in his head, anxiously trying to sort through which ones were "safe" to share, while almost desperately wishing he were strong enough to also share the ones that weren't. Ryuji had already confided in him plenty of times, and he keeps getting the sense that it'd be perfectly fine to do the same. he wants to, even. he doesn't want to keep Ryuji at an arm's length like he does almost everybody else.]
[which. whoa. there's a hell of a feeling.]
[when Dave finally does start talking, it's still pretty curated, but it also just starts spilling out, like leaving a mug under running water until it fills and overflows, like he's really, really been wanting to try talking about this for a while.]
Well — okay, just puttin' a disclaimer here that I'm basically the worst person to try to explain any of this. Time's my thing, not sorting out the largely pointless fuckin' whimsies of Paradox Space and anybody who gets subjected to it.
I've told you the goal of playing Sburb before. But to make an incredibly stupid story short, we didn't win. ["they never got that far," he'd said earlier. they were never meant to. there were much larger forces than a single session at play, as largely important as perpetuating existence is to begin with.]
So, like you do with any video game when it's obvious you're not gonna make it to the end, we reset it. Started a new session, with new rules, new quests, new — [god, even just saying this feels like he's edging dangerously close to something really sensitive.] — new players. But, the game restarted pretty far from where we were at the time.
[there's a weird feeling in the pit of his stomach, wondering if he's messing something up by disclosing all of this. but it's too late now, he's already talking, and he's not really capable of stopping.]
It took three years to get there. It was me, my sister, Terezi and a couple of other trolls in a lab that honestly wasn't too much different than this place, on a meteor hurtling through space.
[he's circling back around to something much safer now.] Anyway, that's where the mayor and Can Town was, too. Kinda had to make your own fun, y'know?
[Look, it's not like Ryuji knows that it was just the ribbon to a jar of mayo with an R scratched into it to officiate its own insistence. And if that's all it takes to claim power somewhere, hell, why hasn't someone else tried that within the station? Oh, right. There was a town hall. Nobody wanted anyone in a leadership role. Cans must've been serious business on this meteor. He doesn't question it.
It is, however, a really convoluted retelling, and he's doing his best to listen without interrupting. Nods when he says that time's his thing, because he can relate to being absolute shit at explaining things. Raises an eyebrow when he says that he restarted his session. He's picturing an old famicon system with a button that you flip up and everything glitches out for .5 seconds before going back to the title screen. Senses inklings of hesitation and things that are being purposely expanded or contracted upon. It's cool, he doesn't mind.
There's an implication, of course, that failing the game had seriously undesirable consequences. It tickles against the idea that Dave had repeated a few times already about the way things were "supposed to work out." Kind of weird to know that destiny had worked out its own red string that purposely built in a clause for the right ending to be... well, a bad one? There's not much more he can conclude from that. Having to reset everything to set things on the right path to move forward... what does that even look like?]
I was right about you, y'know. When we first met, I said you were a damn cheater. [In the way that thumb wrestling was serious business, of course. It's something he says to break the period of silence that ensues, and, yeah, he has some questions, but putting them into actual words is kind of rough.]
But... uh. It's kinda weird that you had to travel to get to your new game? Like... why wouldn't you just reset in place? Y'know. You hit the reset button on your sigma station and it's not like you toss the console into another room or anything.
[And, then, as if it were an after thought to everything, because obviously, they had figured out their own way to make fun on a station chilling in the middle of a galaxy that was far, far away from their own---]
New players? Should I be expectin' to see a new game plus Dave walking around here somewhere? [Awkward, but it's... a little easier than pointing out the incredibly strange subcutaneous question that kind of clouds that one. Did he really sacrifice everything in his game to make it work for someone else? Like, shit.
[leave it to Ryuji to crack the kind of joke that would put Dave at ease, even as he's also asking questions that don't really have easy, or pleasant, answers.]
Dunno how to answer these without being kinda blunt. [and maybe it's better if he just goes ahead and is blunt. maybe it'll get easier to talk anything out if he does, like when you have wound that needs healing, but you have to tear through a lot of pain to even get to that point.]
Yeah, I'll own up to it — I'm a damn dirty cheater. Kinda had to be, for things to wind up the way they did. Scratching a session is sorta like ... I dunno, resetting your game without saving and starting over. Or wiping your computer and having to rebuild your music library — it'll look the same in a lot of ways, but it also won't be built up exactly how it was before.
You have to cheat if you want to wind up on the other side of it. [they were the only bits of coding that remained from the original session. the data that defied the regular rules and escaped erasure, if only because it's something they were slated to do all along.]
[that's just one of those things you don't realize was intended until you look back on it. it wasn't really something he was expecting to survive, anyway, considering the way he and Rose had been arguing over who got to be the exploding Bruce Willis of their soon-to-be-rewritten session. the only way those troll ghosts were able to survive their Scratch was by dying, which. wow, that's a really dumb sentence i just typed.]
[Dave sort of feels like he's being a buzzkill now. like maybe this wasn't a really good idea. but he doesn't want to leave Ryuji's other questions hanging, either.]
But like I said, I don't really get why a lot of shit happens the way it does. I'm sure Rose explained why the new session was so far away, but fuck if I remember what it was.
And — yeah, I guess? He had his own shit to do, though, based on what Dirk's told me, and that didn't include Sburb. I couldn't really tell you what he was like, or really anything he did other than a few little things.
[It's definitely a lot to absorb all at once, but more than anything, he knows they're getting into territory that feels a lot more raw than the things that they talked about before. Something about all of this just makes him want to do something really dumb like branch an arm over his shoulder and pull him in. Ryuji doesn't really see this as a buzkill at all, rather, an explanation of things and the events that led up to him being here. And here, as much as it sucks most of the time, is made leaps and bounds better by the equally inept teen sitting next to him. It's on his docket to remind Dave of that, pretty much... as much as humanly damn possible.]
Shit... that ain't right. It sounds like. A lot of responsibility to take on all at once, and it kinds sucks that it had to play out like that. [He sort of gets it. The idea of purpose is something that Ryuji's kept close to him for a long time now, and he's not sure how he'd be able to stomach that everything he had done was pretty much a set up for something else to succeed. He doesn't have the full picture yet, of course, but that's how it reads, and he's slightly ticked off about it. A game where the cards are stacked against you indefinitely, and the only way to win that game is to blow a hole right through it.
He'd been in that position before. Ren said that everything had worked out in the end, and he had to believe it in order to keep on going. A video game, or in his case, a god, it sounds just. Dumb. All of it. Something you're not meant to win goes against the very nature of human drive.]
Everything kinda comes down to circumstance, anyway, if you look at it. [That urge to do something stupid rises up again in him, and it's killing him not to be outwardly physical about things. He'll practice a little bit more restraint, though. This is still a weird territory of... whatever "them" is.] That's a different Dave. So what? Y'know? You did enough on your terms, too. You deserve to be happy, no matter who that other butthead is.
[Ryuji may or may not realize just how badly Dave needed to hear that. it's easy to dismiss yourself when the collective universes do the exact same, and make it very clear that you were just a means to an end, that you aren't the one who's going to go on to actually win, to do whatever it is the Dave who isn't him is supposed to. like he's an inkpen that was tossed aside in favor of a better one, because the ink ran dry and there was no fight left in it.]
[but that means exactly jackshit here, doesn't it? this isn't the dream bubbles, there's no army of ghosts to be joining up with to fight the Incredible Hulk, and he hated that idea anyway. even if that were something he was meant to go back and get involved in, it's not like he would know which direction to start flying from here.]
[it's the tiniest of sparks in the pit of misery of what it means to be a time player — or just a player of Sburb in general. the sacrifices that have to be made. that particular end goal isn't his anymore, but ... that doesn't have to mean he's been denied one entirely. right?]
[boy, that sounds. hopelessly hopeful. kind of cheesy to boot. and it'll take a while for him to really believe it in a meaningful capacity. but even if Dave doesn't know what the hell his end goal actually is, it kind of feels like Ryuji has turned him around and at least pointed in the direction he should start walking.]
Yeah. Complete butthead. [does this count as dunking yourself???]
A lot of it was completely shitty, you're right. But it wasn't all terrible. My friends all lived really far away from me, so it was cool to be able to hang out in person. Or at least know that they were somewhere in the same space I was.
Wrote some of my best raps on that meteor, too. [it's The Little Things.]
[That definitely counted as dunking yourself, Dave.
But it does stand justifiable to continue down that path of thinking. Not the part where Ryuji thoroughly believes that he's the only one allowed to torment Dave like that (he bumps up a little against him to remind him on that point), but the acceptance that it doesn't have to be a fixed end point. If there's another Dave out that that gets to do the things that he doesn't, it isn't intrinsically true that whatever this Dave does is meaningless or any less fruitful. If there were millions of universes where either copies of them existed, hell, even a Ryuji living in Tokyo right now with a fixed family, or some sort of semblance of what constitutes a much better life, that's that Ryuji's prerogative. And, given the chance to know about the existence of that Ryuji, maybe he'd feel a little jealousy over it, but, shit. He's not about to let it ruin the experiences he's had. The friends he's made along the way. The insistence of the way he feels, right here and now, sitting as he drifts along in a lonely void of space next to Dave.
Hopelessly hopeful, or whatever that looks like... it's not invalid. He's always believed that freedom has its own form of vividly beautiful aesthetic; it's something he's said over and over again to just about everyone he's met. Do what you want to in life, don't hold back. That dumb, optimistic, punk kind of attitude.]
I dunno. Bein' with people you like and sharing time together is kinda worth all the sorts of trouble it takes gettin' there. Took me a pretty damn long time to figure that out.
[They're both pretty self-sacrificing people. Ryuji isn't so far removed from the reality of that to not accept it. If he knows how far he'd go for his friends, he has an idea of what Dave would do, too. It's respectable.
And, yeah, fuck it.
Under the blanket, he reaches out and wraps an arm around his shoulder, squeezing and smiling. It's been killing him to not do it.]
[if Dave and Ryuji hadn't pretty much immediately gotten into a physical thumb war altercation the second they first met, and if Ryuji had not placed an affable hand on his shoulder after holding a somber service for their fallen burrito comrade, then Dave might be reacting a lot differently to the contact now.]
[and, well — okay, this sort of has a lot of different connotations along with the usual ones, and yeah, he can't help tensing for a split second because of that.]
[this is ... okay, right? he thinks it might be okay. it somehow feels like this is really, officially, unwinding every single idea he'd ever had about himself, the way he thought he was, the way he thought he's supposed to be, and for that same split second it also feels like he can't breathe. just when he thought he had everything about himself, about his own place in the universe, figured out, Ryuji goes and turns it all on its side, and now he has no idea what to do about anything. like, suddenly, the last thing he wants to do is just accept what he's supposed to as a byproduct of a doomed timeline.]
[wait, shit — he just leaned in closer without realizing, didn't he? turns out while Dave's brain was panicking about whether this was really okay, the rest of him went ahead and decided that it was — it was something he desperately wanted, in fact. hearts, right.]
[there really is no keeping Ryuji at an arm's length, as it turns out. he'll be trying to sort out when he even made that decision for a while. also, try breathing, Dave. let's not have a repeat of last month.]
You're right — both those things you just said, I mean. [he'll be sorting out how entirely lame he is later, too.]
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[he doesn't really have anything to say to that, though. it's true that he's used music as something of a means of escape, building a place to be surrounded by good vibes, attaching himself to something he loves to forget everything he hated about his life back home. but after a while, the fact that a song is meant to play that role becomes attached to it, too, which is souring in its own way.]
[maybe that's just another reason why he spends so much time remixing everything.]
[Dave stretches his legs out, sinking just slightly against the wall. he's not upset; if anything, he's relaxing, finding a comfort in the fact that there's just one more idea they both seem to value, one more thing they've got in common. and, he's just listening.]
Thanks, by the way. For letting me listen. [embarrassing shit and all. you can tell a lot about a person from the music they keep handy. even the Ponyo song carried a lot of meaning that was easily gleaned.]
Might be biased over here, but I'm thinking you got one of the best ghost gifts so far, easily. It even edges out the monkey pajamas.
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He lets out a throaty hnn..., a vestige of his own native language used when you're basically agreeing with something, but the economy of words needed to do so was strong enough to be conveyed by a sound rather than a spoken something instead. He gets to thinking about home for a moment, and rather than the normal levels of homesickness that it implies, he starts wondering some hypotheticals. If Dave were back there, and he was, and if they had known each other, what would this look like? Would it be different? Would they have gotten close like this or was everything just perpetuated by the situational morass that the terminal had to offer? Would he be trying to stifle down the way he feels about him?
He lets his head lean up against the wall behind him. Even in simple things there are layers of complexity if you go deeper into the things that make them up. But might as well talk about it rather than play around with the idea of talking about it.]
You think you'd ever... uh. Wanna see Tokyo one day? I mean. Like. Hypothetically speaking. I know it's kinda dumb to think gettin' off this station's happenin' anytime soon. But I'd wanna take you to an arcade. Or maybe one of those music halls where DJ's spin music live time.
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[hypotheticals aren't a bad thing to throw out there, though, not when reality isn't much of a picnic. at least, the scenario laid out on the floor between them is pretty nice. it's lots better than the one running through Dave's head for a minute or two.]
[how would this even work? how could he even explain the effort it'd take to meet outside the confines of this space station? "here, Ryuji, just go down for a nap, and if the stars and stupidfuck whimsies of space-time align, if the horrorterrors even allow for someone not playing Sburb to have a dream bubble, you'll pop up in the exact corner of Paradox Space where I am. and then, I'll have to wait for you to realize that you're just dreaming. and then, I dunno, guess we'll go apeshit until you wake up."]
[would he even buy that? moreover, would Ryuji even be willing to go through that effort for him?]
[best not to think about it right now.]
Yeah, I wouldn't mind seeing it. I'm interested in trying ramen that isn't just the packets you pull out of the toilet.
Don't know a word of Japanese though.
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Better to just deal with easier what-ifs, then. Without space time paradoxes, or the unlikelihood of whether or not it would be feasible; forget about logistics. Just things he'd like to show Dave, places he'd take him. Some giant ceramic cow in front of a cheese shop. Yoyogi Park. Shinjuku. Hell, Roppongi, if he wanted to jeer at the hoity toity ins and outs of the spendthrifts of the ridiculously luxurious.
Or just his favorite ramen shop, a little hole in the wall that he discovered and brought his whole track team to, filling out every seat of the bar as they slurped down hot noodles until their throats burned in a competitive streak of who could be fastest on the circuit and in the dining room. The comment gets a rise out of him as he looks over at Dave. Changes the song to something worse, more embarrassing; an anime theme song, because why the hell not? He gets to get the 360 experience of Ryuji Sakamoto after all.]
The good stuff. You know, where there's this little old lady at the back of the shop who hasn't washed her sauce pot in decades and that's where they make the bone broth! [Somehow that's sanitary... somehow- like the heat is always kept at such a high point that it never allows bacteria to seep in.] It'd be fun. Or... you know, there's this train ride you take and you try out all the curries of the local areas you stop. I ain't really ever been out in the country much, so it'd be new for the both of us!
[Oh, right, language. He laughs- it'd be funny to try and watch him interact with people. Almost as bad as his own interaction back in the states on his trip to Hawaii.]
Eh, I'd teach you some stuff. And the stuff you don't know? Don't worry, your boy's gotchu.
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[also, Dave bungles English badly enough on his own that he'd have an absolutely terrible time communicating with non-native speakers. though, maybe that's exactly why Ryuji finds the idea so funny.]
[... heh. bung.]
All right, but I'll be leaving wholly dissatisfied if I don't know every single rude word by the time the visit's over.
Anyway, trains weren't really a big thing in Houston — at least, I never knew anybody who used 'em. Most people just drove themselves everywhere.
[that is to say, he's never been on one before. there's a wealth of hypotheticals there, experiences that'll probably never happen, but it's kind of nice to talk about them anyway. sort of like mutually imagining that they're somewhere much better than the only options they actually have, with the added bonus of being there together.]
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Wait. He's not Japanese. They'd probably laugh and think it was hilarious. Hell, Ryuji kind of wants to hear him rip out a meaty surprise of "YOU!" in that rude way that gets peoples' attention.]
Yeah. Goes without sayin'. You'd probably pick up half the bad shit from me alone anyway. [He didn't just earn the nickname "vulgar boy" ending phrases in politeness, he almost always used informal contexts, even when talking to people that should've been shown respect. But he doesn't have respect for people in the world who don't respect him, and it was kind of... cringe worthy sometimes, to be honest.
And maybe because it's Dave and he doesn't care as much what his mind is getting at around him, but he can't contain himself, nor his smile for very long. Yeah, he'd ride a train in Houston. Even eat some green eggs and ham if it came down to it. Shit, doing it with Dave would probably be 80% of the fun anyway. But there's a burning question he (with much cultural insensitivity) he has first---]
Are there uh. Cowboys in Houston?
[Are you a cowboy Dave?]
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[what they're doing right now is pretty high up there on the list, too, though. embarrassing anime intro themes and all.]
[anyway, guess i'm buying this getup for Dave next. it can live in the cupboard with the monkey pajamas, never to be worn by their respective owners, right up until they do actually wear them. and it will be good.]
[Dave's expression is as flat and serious as ever, and with all the air of someone who's about to drop a few sentences that's a mix of both truth and complete bullshit. can Ryuji spot his tell? it's the way the corners of his mouth upturn the tiniest, tiniest fraction.]
Absolutely. There may, in fact, even be tens of them. Someone's gotta wrangle all the emus.
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Does he fall for it? Hell yeah, he does. At least at first. He has no idea how big Houston actually is, but he reckons it's somewhere between a one horse saloon like in those old timey macaroni westerns and a sprawling metropolis. Look, this is the kid who thought LA was the capital, leave it up to his imagination and he's bound to mess it up. His mouth goes open wide. Cowboys are real, huh? That's pretty damn awesome.
Wait a second. This seems fishy.]
You're really gonna think I'd fall for that? C'mon, there's gotta be more than tens of them if there are that many emus just wanderin' around the place.
[Is he playing with Dave back or is he being sincere? Who knows. It works both ways.]
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Okay, fine, there's twenties of them. And that's at the absolute maximum.
[you know what they say about the dude ranches. it's a little wild and a little strange, when you make your home out on the range — because there's whole herds of emus out there, apparently.]
[this is getting kind of silly. Dave didn't really hear much of the last song, either, but even as a kid who is pretty much obsessed with hearing new music, he doesn't seem all that bothered by it.]
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Yeah, I mean... any more and you'd have warring clans of ho-downs and rodeo shows, and then Houston-chan would probably fall off into the ocean from the thunderous quakes of all the square dancing going down.
[He'll hit play on the next song, and then leave it up to shuffle to decide his fate from here on out. Considering the fact that Ryuji doesn't have the slightest clue what square dancing actually looks like, he just assumes it's a deadly art form that he was never meant to learn or capture the essence of. He'll stick to his whipping and his nae-nae'ing, which is probably close. Or something like that.]
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Toss a few hootenannies in there and you've more or less got an accurate picture of how it'd go.
[rest in peace, Houston-chan. drowned in the Gulf of Goofy Jokes About Texas Stereotypes.]
If we're talking hypotheticals, though, I wouldn't mind showing you some of the places where I used to like hanging out. Not just Houston.
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[And why do they hoot?
He has no idea what Dave is going on about, which, okay, that's definitely not something that has ever happened before, right? Accurate pictures be damned.]
Tch. 'Wouldn't mind~', and here I was practically about to shove your ass into an arcade and win you one of those dumb overstuffed radish toys that everyone is always obsessed with.
[He's smiling though, clearly a lack of intentional hurt behind his tone, and he's curious. What sort of places is he talking about? He doesn't have the greatest picture of Dave's home, hell, as of right now it's just rife with cliches that he's seen in movies or something like that, and even then... did he mean places that he wound up after he started playing his game? There's so much Ryuji wants to know about him, and only if he had the mental wherewithal to compile a list of sorts, instead of just spitballing questions whenever they popped up.]
Yeah? Liiiike?
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[you win this round, Sakamoto.]
They're hooting and competitive knitting, obviously. Makin' stuffed radishes for you to win in a round of DDR, or whatever.
Anyway, there's a record shop back in Houston that I really always liked. There's always my planet, too, if you're a fan of endless miles of lava, gears, and those crocodiles I mentioned earlier.
[maybe ... not the whole of his apartment, if they were to hypothetically visit, but just his room. that's safe, right? even if he'd sort of had a nervous breakdown last time he was in there, it's still very much a reflection of who he is. or who he always sort of wanted to be.]
[plus, the toilet that's still sitting there would be amusingly relevant. Dave would say that's just where he gets all his great ideas.]
I'd really want you to meet my friends, too, though. I keep getting the feeling that y'all would like each other.
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Like the type of place that sells LPs? Sounds cool. The best part about that is always flippin' through and seein' all the cover art. They got more room, so they can really go all out. [A steady Jazz resurgence all over Tokyo in the past decade has turned some of those old record stores into a hipster paradise, but there were definitely some hole-in-the-wall type places that still existed where it didn't feel like its style was eternally cramped by salarymen coming in and grabbing stuff up to try and hitch onto the bandwagon.
The toilet would be all types of amusing though. Why did the shitter have such significance to all things Dave and Ryuji? This wasn't supposed to happen, I swear.]
Yeah, you think so? Shit, I'd have to make a good impression. Make sure I cut this mop off, clean up my jumpsuit, shower a little extra hard. [Joking, really, he probably wouldn't do any of that.] You've met like, half my friends already. I uh. I hope you like 'em. They're all good peeps.
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Yeah. [that's an answer to both questions. Dave's music library is largely digital, on account of not always having the extra change to spend on physical records, but he did always enjoy at least browsing.]
[and yeah, he does like Ryuji's friends — and in this yarn of what-ifs they're spinning, he can't help but wonder how meeting everyone he knows would actually go down. his friends are a huge mess of very strong personalities, but ... that doesn't really seem too far off from what he knows about the Phantom Thieves, either.]
Wouldn't worry too much about making a good first impression, though. They'll probably think you're weird, but that's pretty much the one qualifying trait they're looking for in friendship. You'd fit right in.
You're gonna have to meet the mayor, too. [Dave's favorite thing about Sburb ever.]
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I like how you just low key called me weird. [He doesn't let him off the hook on that one, though. It's kind of true though, isn't it? Ryuji can't really be that offended. He's spent so long being around the same people, that it always felt like he was just being himself. The more people he meets on the station, the more he sees that he's an exception to the rule, not the norm. Sometimes Ryuji forgets how much of a complete loner he was for the years that led up to starting the Phantom Thieves.]
Oh yeah. You mentioned that guy before. [And here he was, putting 2 and 2 together a little bit more.] I'm gettin' the sense that we're not talkin' about the mayor of Houston.
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[that ... hm. that probably doesn't make any goddamn sense out of context. then again, when has anything Dave ever said made sense out of context?]
[he falls silent for a minute, just listening to whatever's playing. letting the rhythm resonate. he's a lot more relaxed than he figures he ought to be, considering not too long ago they were both navigating probably the most awkward attempt at flirting that has ever been witnessed in this particular patch of space. maybe that's just how safe of a thing music is to him. Dave sort of feels like he could fall asleep right there on the floor.]
I haven't told you much of anything about the meteor, huh.
[or try to talk about himself a bit more. it isn't that he hasn't wanted to, he's just so hilariously bad at it — afraid of acknowledging a lot of it, rather. maybe he can figure out something more to say than jokes about hollering grandmas or emu ranches.]
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[Yeah, pretty much right on the nose with that assumption there. And he's perfectly fine with ragging on him about it, comfortable in his own way of being fond of the bullshit that he runs with.
It is kind of cool, though. If Dave were a jigsaw puzzle, Ryuji gets a little piece every now and then, and sometimes the parts fit on opposite ends of the greater picture. And if Dave is worried that the jumbled up image that comes out of that is one that he doesn't like, this loser over here would protest that to the very end. There hasn't been a single thing between them that Ryuji didn't find himself liking more and more as time went on, and god, he's doomed to live out his days with these awkward feelings that he just doesn't know how to act on.
But, that's not what's on his mind at the moment as music wafts between their shared space. Mostly, just curiosity.]
Nah, not really. [Head up against the wall, his tone shifts a little more away from joking.] Tell me about it.
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[it might be starting to sound like this mayor doesn't actually have the credentials Dave is building him up with. which is flat-out wrong, of course; the guy has a sash that says mayor on it — what other credentials do you even need?]
If I'm gonna get into Can Town itself, and ... everything else, though, I guess I'd need to start toward the beginning.
[and he's already turning the details over and over in his head, anxiously trying to sort through which ones were "safe" to share, while almost desperately wishing he were strong enough to also share the ones that weren't. Ryuji had already confided in him plenty of times, and he keeps getting the sense that it'd be perfectly fine to do the same. he wants to, even. he doesn't want to keep Ryuji at an arm's length like he does almost everybody else.]
[which. whoa. there's a hell of a feeling.]
[when Dave finally does start talking, it's still pretty curated, but it also just starts spilling out, like leaving a mug under running water until it fills and overflows, like he's really, really been wanting to try talking about this for a while.]
Well — okay, just puttin' a disclaimer here that I'm basically the worst person to try to explain any of this. Time's my thing, not sorting out the largely pointless fuckin' whimsies of Paradox Space and anybody who gets subjected to it.
I've told you the goal of playing Sburb before. But to make an incredibly stupid story short, we didn't win. ["they never got that far," he'd said earlier. they were never meant to. there were much larger forces than a single session at play, as largely important as perpetuating existence is to begin with.]
So, like you do with any video game when it's obvious you're not gonna make it to the end, we reset it. Started a new session, with new rules, new quests, new — [god, even just saying this feels like he's edging dangerously close to something really sensitive.] — new players. But, the game restarted pretty far from where we were at the time.
[there's a weird feeling in the pit of his stomach, wondering if he's messing something up by disclosing all of this. but it's too late now, he's already talking, and he's not really capable of stopping.]
It took three years to get there. It was me, my sister, Terezi and a couple of other trolls in a lab that honestly wasn't too much different than this place, on a meteor hurtling through space.
[he's circling back around to something much safer now.] Anyway, that's where the mayor and Can Town was, too. Kinda had to make your own fun, y'know?
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It is, however, a really convoluted retelling, and he's doing his best to listen without interrupting. Nods when he says that time's his thing, because he can relate to being absolute shit at explaining things. Raises an eyebrow when he says that he restarted his session. He's picturing an old famicon system with a button that you flip up and everything glitches out for .5 seconds before going back to the title screen. Senses inklings of hesitation and things that are being purposely expanded or contracted upon. It's cool, he doesn't mind.
There's an implication, of course, that failing the game had seriously undesirable consequences. It tickles against the idea that Dave had repeated a few times already about the way things were "supposed to work out." Kind of weird to know that destiny had worked out its own red string that purposely built in a clause for the right ending to be... well, a bad one? There's not much more he can conclude from that. Having to reset everything to set things on the right path to move forward... what does that even look like?]
I was right about you, y'know. When we first met, I said you were a damn cheater. [In the way that thumb wrestling was serious business, of course. It's something he says to break the period of silence that ensues, and, yeah, he has some questions, but putting them into actual words is kind of rough.]
But... uh. It's kinda weird that you had to travel to get to your new game? Like... why wouldn't you just reset in place? Y'know. You hit the reset button on your sigma station and it's not like you toss the console into another room or anything.
[And, then, as if it were an after thought to everything, because obviously, they had figured out their own way to make fun on a station chilling in the middle of a galaxy that was far, far away from their own---]
New players? Should I be expectin' to see a new game plus Dave walking around here somewhere? [Awkward, but it's... a little easier than pointing out the incredibly strange subcutaneous question that kind of clouds that one. Did he really sacrifice everything in his game to make it work for someone else? Like, shit.
That's rough.]
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Dunno how to answer these without being kinda blunt. [and maybe it's better if he just goes ahead and is blunt. maybe it'll get easier to talk anything out if he does, like when you have wound that needs healing, but you have to tear through a lot of pain to even get to that point.]
Yeah, I'll own up to it — I'm a damn dirty cheater. Kinda had to be, for things to wind up the way they did. Scratching a session is sorta like ... I dunno, resetting your game without saving and starting over. Or wiping your computer and having to rebuild your music library — it'll look the same in a lot of ways, but it also won't be built up exactly how it was before.
You have to cheat if you want to wind up on the other side of it. [they were the only bits of coding that remained from the original session. the data that defied the regular rules and escaped erasure, if only because it's something they were slated to do all along.]
[that's just one of those things you don't realize was intended until you look back on it. it wasn't really something he was expecting to survive, anyway, considering the way he and Rose had been arguing over who got to be the exploding Bruce Willis of their soon-to-be-rewritten session. the only way those troll ghosts were able to survive their Scratch was by dying, which. wow, that's a really dumb sentence i just typed.]
[Dave sort of feels like he's being a buzzkill now. like maybe this wasn't a really good idea. but he doesn't want to leave Ryuji's other questions hanging, either.]
But like I said, I don't really get why a lot of shit happens the way it does. I'm sure Rose explained why the new session was so far away, but fuck if I remember what it was.
And — yeah, I guess? He had his own shit to do, though, based on what Dirk's told me, and that didn't include Sburb. I couldn't really tell you what he was like, or really anything he did other than a few little things.
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Shit... that ain't right. It sounds like. A lot of responsibility to take on all at once, and it kinds sucks that it had to play out like that. [He sort of gets it. The idea of purpose is something that Ryuji's kept close to him for a long time now, and he's not sure how he'd be able to stomach that everything he had done was pretty much a set up for something else to succeed. He doesn't have the full picture yet, of course, but that's how it reads, and he's slightly ticked off about it. A game where the cards are stacked against you indefinitely, and the only way to win that game is to blow a hole right through it.
He'd been in that position before. Ren said that everything had worked out in the end, and he had to believe it in order to keep on going. A video game, or in his case, a god, it sounds just. Dumb. All of it. Something you're not meant to win goes against the very nature of human drive.]
Everything kinda comes down to circumstance, anyway, if you look at it. [That urge to do something stupid rises up again in him, and it's killing him not to be outwardly physical about things. He'll practice a little bit more restraint, though. This is still a weird territory of... whatever "them" is.] That's a different Dave. So what? Y'know? You did enough on your terms, too. You deserve to be happy, no matter who that other butthead is.
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[but that means exactly jackshit here, doesn't it? this isn't the dream bubbles, there's no army of ghosts to be joining up with to fight the Incredible Hulk, and he hated that idea anyway. even if that were something he was meant to go back and get involved in, it's not like he would know which direction to start flying from here.]
[it's the tiniest of sparks in the pit of misery of what it means to be a time player — or just a player of Sburb in general. the sacrifices that have to be made. that particular end goal isn't his anymore, but ... that doesn't have to mean he's been denied one entirely. right?]
[boy, that sounds. hopelessly hopeful. kind of cheesy to boot. and it'll take a while for him to really believe it in a meaningful capacity. but even if Dave doesn't know what the hell his end goal actually is, it kind of feels like Ryuji has turned him around and at least pointed in the direction he should start walking.]
Yeah. Complete butthead. [does this count as dunking yourself???]
A lot of it was completely shitty, you're right. But it wasn't all terrible. My friends all lived really far away from me, so it was cool to be able to hang out in person. Or at least know that they were somewhere in the same space I was.
Wrote some of my best raps on that meteor, too. [it's The Little Things.]
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But it does stand justifiable to continue down that path of thinking. Not the part where Ryuji thoroughly believes that he's the only one allowed to torment Dave like that (he bumps up a little against him to remind him on that point), but the acceptance that it doesn't have to be a fixed end point. If there's another Dave out that that gets to do the things that he doesn't, it isn't intrinsically true that whatever this Dave does is meaningless or any less fruitful. If there were millions of universes where either copies of them existed, hell, even a Ryuji living in Tokyo right now with a fixed family, or some sort of semblance of what constitutes a much better life, that's that Ryuji's prerogative. And, given the chance to know about the existence of that Ryuji, maybe he'd feel a little jealousy over it, but, shit. He's not about to let it ruin the experiences he's had. The friends he's made along the way. The insistence of the way he feels, right here and now, sitting as he drifts along in a lonely void of space next to Dave.
Hopelessly hopeful, or whatever that looks like... it's not invalid. He's always believed that freedom has its own form of vividly beautiful aesthetic; it's something he's said over and over again to just about everyone he's met. Do what you want to in life, don't hold back. That dumb, optimistic, punk kind of attitude.]
I dunno. Bein' with people you like and sharing time together is kinda worth all the sorts of trouble it takes gettin' there. Took me a pretty damn long time to figure that out.
[They're both pretty self-sacrificing people. Ryuji isn't so far removed from the reality of that to not accept it. If he knows how far he'd go for his friends, he has an idea of what Dave would do, too. It's respectable.
And, yeah, fuck it.
Under the blanket, he reaches out and wraps an arm around his shoulder, squeezing and smiling. It's been killing him to not do it.]
True. You do have the sickest flows.
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[and, well — okay, this sort of has a lot of different connotations along with the usual ones, and yeah, he can't help tensing for a split second because of that.]
[this is ... okay, right? he thinks it might be okay. it somehow feels like this is really, officially, unwinding every single idea he'd ever had about himself, the way he thought he was, the way he thought he's supposed to be, and for that same split second it also feels like he can't breathe. just when he thought he had everything about himself, about his own place in the universe, figured out, Ryuji goes and turns it all on its side, and now he has no idea what to do about anything. like, suddenly, the last thing he wants to do is just accept what he's supposed to as a byproduct of a doomed timeline.]
[wait, shit — he just leaned in closer without realizing, didn't he? turns out while Dave's brain was panicking about whether this was really okay, the rest of him went ahead and decided that it was — it was something he desperately wanted, in fact. hearts, right.]
[there really is no keeping Ryuji at an arm's length, as it turns out. he'll be trying to sort out when he even made that decision for a while. also, try breathing, Dave. let's not have a repeat of last month.]
You're right — both those things you just said, I mean. [he'll be sorting out how entirely lame he is later, too.]
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