Dave got a sinking, suffocating feeling whenever he thought about the last time loop he had to complete.
He wasn't too concerned about it, of course. He was well aware he had an extra life screwing around on Derse somewhere. His approaching death by Jack attack wouldn't be game over. But the idea that this was going to be the sum of all the time loops he'd been running, the capstone to three days of leveling and grinding, and Terezis confirmation that there was no God-tier consolation prize awaiting him at the end, left him feeling…something.
Something he'd prefer not to meditate on. Which wasn't hard, since he was currently trekking through knee high snow in jeans and a long sleeved t-shirt, only a few inches from literally freezing his ass off. He'd complained a few times near the end of his time loop extravaganza about the heat on LOHAC, and now felt certain the very existence of the Land of Frost and Frogs was Skaias way of a snide rebuttal. He was tempted to change into one of his suits to see if that helped, but he set out on this journey back to temporal linearity without those ridiculous threads and that was how he intended to finish it.
That was also how he had to finish it, since that was what he remembered seeing himself wearing when he got/gets punked by Jack, God-dog edition, but that was beside the point.
A structure came into view ahead, a little yellow stone rectangular box with an opening, and he made his way towards it. It sat hugged up against a line of dead, snow coated trees stretching back into the horizon, which was marked by a rise he assumed was probably Jade's dormant volcano.
He hated that Jade was going to have to see him get perforated later. He was willing to bet it was going to freak her out just a little, like it did when she somehow managed to catch a peek of that green suited sucker Dave still laying there dead next to his quest bed back on LOHAC. But at least he'd have her around to resurrect him. Better than Egbert or, god forbid, Lalonde.
The ecto-sibling thing still creeped him out. He'd been debating for a while now whether he ought to delete some of his and Rose's older pesterlogs.
Dave eventually reached the rectangle sticking up out of the snow, the little room inside being about as spacious as a phone booth. It kept the biting wind off him though, and the spiral staircase in the middle of the floor seemed promising. The further down he went, he figured, the warmer it would be.
The staircase went below ground for a while before bottoming out in a much larger room. There were some pretty ornate windows overlooking what appeared to be a frozen underground lake full of iced-over frogs, all reflecting the light of Skaia from where it penetrated through a hole in the roof of the cavern far above. Dave made a point of ignoring all of it, instead focusing on the shitty iguana statue in the otherwise empty room.
At least it was warmer down there.
With a flick of his wrists he summoned his timetables and eased the records back, reverting to a time-frame seconds before his past self, freezing and shivering in front of one of Jade's gates, cut communications so he could go find somewhere warmer to hole up. He estimated he spent an hour or so getting here, which meant he had an hour to talk to Jade some more before he had to clear out.
He reactivated his iShades and spoke, the product of fake magic/alchemy converting his words to text, conveniently ignoring capitalization and punctuation.
"Ok I'm back. An hour later."
He hoped his attempts to enjoy the time travel shenanigans weren't too obvious. He felt like he should be getting off on the advantage it gave him over everyone else, even powerhouses like Egbert. But it just made him feel tired. He used to use some of the extra hours to do constructive things, like dick around with his real turntables, but lately it seemed like if he wasn't running around filling in time loops or trudging his ass through snow he didn't feel like using his powers at all. After three days he was more than ready to usher in the endgame.
Jade's lime green text filled in on the Pesterlog covering up his vision, her surprise over his sick time powers exactly the kind of thing he'd been looking forward to back when he and Terezi had been working on mastering them. Now that he was experiencing it firsthand though, it all felt a little underwhelming.
":0"
The little face came through clear- Dave wasn't sure if it was the result of her actually typing or some kind of facial recognition software like what he had in his iShades- but something about it caught his eye. More text followed, but Dave didn't read it, something about the face making the back of his head itch. It looked…wrong, somehow.
He realized with a sinking feeling that he'd taken too long to respond, that he was supposed to have spoken something by now. Which made no sense, because even though he used his timetables this wasn't a real loop yet, so those kinds of alarm bells shouldn't be going off. But he still couldn't tear his eyes off that face.
A massive headache washed over his brain when he realized what was wrong. The mouth. It should've been a capitalized letter. But what he was looking at right there was a zero.
"Goddamn it Aradia." He said out loud, the words appearing on the screen of his shades even as he blinked to close the Pesterchum window. One hand started to rise to rub at his temples, but he kept it back with a supreme force of will, keeping that hand casual and in its pocket where it belonged. He knew she was nearby, but he didn't know which one it would be. You could never tell with Time players.
"Sorry." Her voice was flat with a faint undercurrent of static. Dave turned to see a familiar metal chassis phasing through a wall that was rapidly morphing into something else. "You appeared to have slipped too far down into a memory. I thought if I played along I could ease you back without the headache."
"S'not your fault." This Aradia had long since stopped bothering moving her mouth when she spoke, her face an expressionless metal mask. Dave said he'd gotten over it, but the effect was too similar to his Bro's face not to send a chill down his spine. "Guess I just forgot where I was. Again."
"You have been doing that a lot lately."
"Yeah well this place has been fuckin' empty a lot lately. Neck deep in the biggest conglomeration of dead ghost spheres in the Void and yet I haven't seen a goddamn soul in…however long it's been."
Dave recognizes the ruins of Aradia's hive taking form behind her, and as the image subsumes his own recollection of the Land of Frost and Frogs he realizes they're in Aradia's land now. The Land of Quartz and Melody.
"Most of those bubbles are gone now," Aradia observes, sitting down at the edge of the grassy landmass her hive sits on. After a moment Dave went to join her.
Quartz crystals stretched out ahead of them, sharp spires rising up from below all the way to the edge of the dreambubble. As Dave got a look around he saw that Aradia was right; the mass of bubbles that he remembered being collected together by the tentacle gods was mostly dispersed. But it was the ring that caught his eye.
The break in the very fabric of the Void, just one part of a circle of destruction and dead ghosts, floated out there in the distance, visible even through the tint of the bubble. Another flash of pain wracked Dave's head as that whole episode came back into focus.
He didn't bother hiding the reaction that time. You could never tell with Aradias, or Daves for that matter, but from the way she spoke this Dave was pretty certain this Aradia was one he knew pretty well.
"Right, the whole kill Lord English speil. Are the Serkets still going around rounding up slaves?"
"No. I think that plan has been mostly abandoned. As to be expected, from progenitors prone to such self-destruction. Last I heard Nitram had taken over recruiting, with a little assistance from my Alpha self to reach these more far flung bubbles."
"I'm surprised the elder squids didn't just shunt me into English's trail while I was out of it."
"As I am. I'm also surprised to see you still here. I thought this was what you wanted. To be relevant again."
"What do you mean?"
"She was here, asking those of us left behind. If we wanted to join in the final battle. To my knowledge, everyone but you left."
"Shit, I don't even remember that."
"She said you wanted more time."
Dave took his iShades off, hooking them into the front of his shirt to stare out into the abyss with absent eyes.
"Why did you stay?" He asks.
He saw her turn to him in his periphery.
"I needed more time too."
Dave envied his Alpha self just a little. Despite his best efforts, he'd run into the douche once or twice while their rumpus fiesta was still coming through the Void, and he knew that Dave would have something to say here. That Dave that wasn't stuck in a thirteen year olds body for a millennia, who got to have experiences outside of repeating stale memories in perpetuity.
Silence reigned for what felt like a while, before Dave eventually broke.
"I thought that was your whole shtick though? Being ready to die on the drop of a fucking hat, all ready to contribute to the greater good or whatever."
"And what about you? I thought you hated being a ghost. If I remember correctly we had a similar conversation in this exact memory wherein you debated whether or not to ask my Alpha self to take you down to join the ranks of Vriska's cannon fodder."
Dave just shrugged. Aradia made no motion at all.
"I guess I just…fuck. I don't know."
"..."
Dave sighed.
"You were right," Aradia said. "When you were talking about it being my 'shtick'. My existence was always meant to be a stepping stone along the way of a greater journey, an inevitable death in effort to defeat a more powerful foe. I see no reason why that should have changed now."
"Seriously? After all this time you're just gonna revert back to that Time player nihilism shit. Fuck Aradia, I thought we were past that."
"Does it even matter if we aren't, anymore?"
Dave wanted to say no. But he didn't.
Instead he replaced his shades, absentmindedly tearing up blades of grass in one hand, his own memory covering the ground in a slowly accumulating layer of snow. Their bubbles were drifting apart again.
"You see Nitram, or you death fairy self again," Dave said, before the arbitrary will of the gods parted them again, probably for the last time. "Tell 'em Dave Strider said fuck it."
"Ribbit."