The laughter came over you like a tidal wave the moment your feet hit the ground in the Medium. This wasn't the reaction you had expected: a part of you was pretty sure that as soon as you were able to stop moving and start thinking, you'd be overcome with a wicked case of the cold sweats. You had been half right, because now that you had time to breathe, the events of the last hour or so rushed through your mind. The memories left you reeling and afraid that your knees finally would finally get tired of shaking and give out completely. It seemed like laughing was the only way to keep yourself from falling apart in front of your friends, who were standing in a semicircle looking out at the Medium instead of at you, or at least they had been until you started laughing like a fucking buffoon.
You laughed at the sheer insanity of how tenuously you had held everyone together throughout the entire delicate process and the fact that you had no idea how you'd managed to spatially and temporally coordinate everything between materializing in the dream bubble and landing here. The slightest misstep at any moment would have doomed you all, and honestly, you hadn't planned any of it out to nearly the extent that the others probably thought you had. You just did what felt right in the moment and hoped that all the timelines would layer over one another in the right spot. In fact, it all came a bit too easily, and for a moment you wondered whether someone had been busy planting subliminal messages in your head, priming you for this moment for quite some time now. Who knows. Maybe someone had. Maybe there was a stern conversation with a sentient pair of sunglasses in your near future.
What was truly hilarious to you, though, was the fact that you had to rap your way through the entire ordeal while you were taking things in and out of your sylladex. You even rhymed "bucket" with "puppet", which wasn't a true rhyme, but it seemed to fit the rules of your fetch modus anyway. You also had to break a line in the middle of a sentence so that you could rhyme "unreal air, Dave" with "Square wave", and you weren't particularly proud of that one- god, that was a fucking terrible one, so unrepresentative of you as a lyricist- but what the hell, you had done the best you could under so much pressure. You started laughing, and now that the floodgates were open you just couldn't fuckin' stop.
You laughed through the cold sweat and through the shaking in your knees, and it felt like you had just gotten away with murder. Some sort of giddy sensation rose in your chest, and you had to lean over and rest your hands on your knees for support, like you were vomiting up cold hard laughter and your body just couldn't take the abuse anymore. It got so bad that you had a hard time breathing through the body-wracking guffaws, and briefly you thought that you might puke for real, like you might just actually gag on a particularly large one and start heaving.
At some point you heard Roxy and Jane whispering to each other, and Roxy walked up to you and put her hand flat on your back, with the palm between your shoulder blades. She didn't move it, she just pressed it there. It felt warm and solid, and you appreciated the gesture. You wanted to turn around and hug her, maybe say something to her, because after all, it had been just you and her for so long. She was the first person you ever touched, and she was touching you now, trying to give you something but not knowing what you needed.
What you needed was to just ride it out. While you did that, you just barely registered how Jake was standing off to the side with a look on his face of alternating hurt, anger, and confusion. "I'm glad you find this so amusing, pal," he said, and that was when you finally noticed the way his one hand kept clenching and unclenching.
With a great deal of effort, you somehow managed to swallow and cut off the bigger howls, although a few chuckles still bubbled to the surface. "No, it's not- Nothing is funny, okay? I just-"
"No, you're just downright tickled after pulling a fast one on your best bro. Epic prank, by the way." He started to slowly approach you, or maybe it just felt slow to you; compared to your rapid heartbeat, everything else just felt like it was swimming through syrup.
You stood up straight and turned to face him, gasping for air that seemed just a little too thick to enter your lungs the right way. "What prank?" You choked out the question a few seconds before you realized what was about to happen. Even if you weren't already in this hysterical state of mind, it wouldn't have been enough time to stop Jake from tackling you to the ground.
"Jake-!" Jane shouted and darted forward, but Roxy grabbed her hand.
Jake straddled you on the dusty ground, pinning you down with his hips and pressing his forearm into your trachea. It was effective, because you sure as hell weren't laughing anymore. Your Derse pajamas put up a good effort at trying to keep the fly of Jake's shorts from digging uncomfortably into your leg, but the fabric was flimsy as shit. He had you strapped the fuck down, and for a moment you had time to wonder if maybe sparring with Brobot had actually taught him something useful.
"Getting me to kiss you like that was some kind of caper, right?" He whispered, inches from your face. You could see dirt on his cheeks and smell the sweat coming up from under his shirt collar. Shit, you could count his fucking eyelashes right now if you wanted, because the adrenaline surge was reaching a new high, what with all that pressure on your throat. You didn't know what to do with your hands, so you grabbed his knees. Your eyes flicked down, and for a moment you saw his brown skin right up next to yours. He was darker than you, but not by much. A part of you had long been convinced that you'd never get to see anything like the contrast of your skin next to his, and you'd never been so glad to be wrong about something in your entire life. "And you were standing behind me the whole time, having a good ol' chuckle about how Jake was prattling on and on, just waiting around to see if I'd do it, yeah?"
You shook your head with an annoyed, defiant expression on your face, hoping that nothing got lost in translation. No, you fucking idiot. I did what I had to do to get us all here alive. Getting Jake to kiss you hadn't been part of the plan until the moment you'd sacked up and severed your own head. As a matter of fact, it had been the only moment of hesitation that you'd allowed yourself to spare throughout the entire ordeal. You barely had enough time to think about what you were doing, much less think about ways to play a prank on your best bro.
Then again, you couldn't exactly tell him any of that with his arm digging into your windpipe. Your chest rose and fell shallowly as the two of you stared each other down, your hands gripping his knees tightly and his breath coming in short, hard bursts that you could feel on your face. The initial spike in your sensory perception from the adrenaline was starting to shut down and fade out from the extended lack of oxygen, because motherfucker was still leaning on your throat. Your heartbeat echoed in your ears, and Jake was all you could see and all you could feel.
After a little while- actually you had no idea how long it took, because time stopped really having any meaning when you couldn't fucking breathe- something broke inside Jake, and his expression sank into weariness. "Sorry," he said, lifting his arm and allowing you to gasp for air. "I guess I didn't- when the time came, for us, I didn't expect the whole rigmarole to be so flipping traumatizing. I had-" He had more to say, but you'd let go of his knees and grabbed the collar of his shirt, pulling him down to where you were on the ground. Before you even realized it, you were leaning up and kissing him, and you didn't even really know how to kiss, much less how to kiss Jake, but you trusted that the two of you would figure it out together. Hell, it technically wasn't even your first kiss.
His body stiffened against you at first, like maybe he still thought this was some kind of frivolous jape on your part, but he slowly relaxed into it and reached up to grab a fistful of your hair. It wasn't gentle, but that was okay. You knew what he'd been about to say, that he had so many things to tell you, the "real" you, whatever that meant. You'd be more than happy to listen to it later, if there ever was a later where you had enough time to sit down and talk about bullshit that probably should be left implied. Maybe there would even be time for the two of you to revisit this kissing, because even as it was happening, you realized that it couldn't go on for too long. There was too much shit that needed doing.
For the moment, though, you gave in to it. You let go of his shirt and slid your hands inside the collar, grabbing his shoulders from between the two layers of clothing. You parted your lips slightly and let him press into you, forcing your head down against the ground once again. He settled down properly on top of you and rested both hands in your hair, tugging at it rhythmically while his breath grew harsh against your lips. It hurt and you fucking loved it, so much so that you made a small noise in the back of your throat, and he did it again, harder. The kiss was a little toothier than you'd been expecting, but you found that you were okay with that as well. In fact, you were starting to think that maybe you'd underestimated Jake's capacity for viciousness. You wondered if either of you would survive a fully realized sexual encounter, especially one conducted under a similar level of adrenal activity, and it occurred to you that you might not ever find out. Desperation ripped through your guts, and you scuttled your feet against the ground, trying to catch some kind of leverage so that you could-
You didn't know what you wanted to do, but you needed to do something. You moved your hands up the back of his neck and pulled him so tightly against you that now your lips were smashing against your own teeth. He made a surprised noise, and you thought that maybe you even tasted some blood. It didn't seem to matter much when compared to the sudden overwhelming need for you to show him just how much this was not a fucking joke to you, because you might never get another chance. It took a second before you realized that the thing digging into your leg was no longer just the buttons on Jake's fly, and that told you pretty much everything you needed to know. Message received, dude. Not just received, but opened, read, and fully comprehended. All sorts of awareness up in this business. Just two guys groping each other and completely grokking the situation. Glad we settled that.
He pulled away and looked down at you with wide, scared eyes. You didn't know what he was afraid of, but it probably had something to do with the honesty of the moment and the intensity of the situation. People just couldn't handle that much naked truth sometimes. You could handle it, although you usually chose to keep it inside and only let it out in carefully controlled doses, not explosive eruptions like this. Oh well.
Somewhere behind you, Roxy cleared her throat. "As much as I fully enjoyed watching that- and don't believe that was sarcasm for even a moment, because it was the nakedest of fucking truths, let me tell you- I think we should probably get going on all of that epic quest business." You rolled your head around to try to catch a glimpse of her from around Jake's body, and you saw that she and Jane had sat down on the ground about ten feet away, holding hands and watching the two of you make out. Roxy looked amused, and Jane looked some kind of horrified. You kinda felt bad about that, but you didn't really know what to do about it.
Jake sat back on his heels, taking the pressure off of your body so that you could sit up. "She's right, you know. We should probably get this adventure started," he said with a small, bittersweet smile. He rose and stood up, reaching his hand down to grasp your forearm. You grabbed his wrist back, and he pulled you up off of the ground and into an awkward but eager hug. It was firm and genuine, like Jake. It was also a lot simpler than the kiss, less a means of forcing through all the messages of years of pent up sexual frustration and loneliness and more a way of saying, shit, dude, I'm glad you're here. I'm glad we're alive.
Roxy caught your eye, and you waved them both over, because this was a feeling you shared with all of them. She ran up and squeezed her arms around the two of you, nestling her head in the crook of your shoulder. Jane was a bit more hesitant, walking slowly and reaching out tentatively. Eventually she too leaned into the group hug, and you all just stood there for a minute, enjoying each other's company and the sensation of so many bodies pressed together out of the sheer and utter joy of being alive. Not even that was allowed to last, though, because Jane broke the silence a short time later. "Is it just me, or does the sky look a little… cracked… to you?"