They say whatever you're looking for, you will find here. They say you come to Alternia and you understand a lot in a few minutes, but the rest has got to be lived. The smell: that's the first thing that hits you, promising everything in exchange for your soul. And the heat; your shirt is straightaway a rag. You can hardly remember your name, or what you came to escape from. But at night, there's a breeze. The river is beautiful. You could be forgiven for thinking there was no war; that the lasers were fireworks; that only pleasure matters. A pieful of sopor, or the touch of a troll who might tell you she's flushed for you. And then, something happens, as you knew it would. And nothing can ever be the same again.

John liked talking with his hands. His voice was pitched just so you could hear him speak at almost any volume, and his blue eyes flashed with excitement over the most mundane things. "Okay, so Lord English, communism, it's all bullshit, let's just get that out of the way right now. And colonialism is no good either. There has to be a third force in this country, a combination of traditional values and—" unfortunately, one of those things was his ridiculous views on international politics.

Dave cleared his throat. "How about we go get dinner?" And you shut up for about a minute, he thought. John smiled and slipped on his blue blazer; the two left the counter and Dave left a boondollar for the bartender. Together they stepped into the light, hot mist of the afternoon. Dave's nose was assaulted by the rich scents of Alternia, as it had been every day of the past two years; the rich scent of wandering lusii, frying grubs the size of hams and grilled hummingbirds as small as bees, more mundane scents such as peppercorns, cumin, cardamom, cinnamon, honey, and suffusing everything, the heady stink of sopor.

In the five minutes it took them to travel from the hotel bar to the restaurant the dirt road had become mud and the two clambered for space on the sidewalk to avoid not only soiling their shoes but the wrath of the many swamped burden-beasts in the road. The crowd gave something of a berth to the humans in fine suits, as much as space permitted, and not a few of them looked on with strong disapproval. How could they know that Dave was a mere reporter, and John working with relief efforts, easing the sting of the atrocities committed by their own government?

With a bright smile, he reached over and defaced a Beforan propaganda poster. Dave clicked his tongue. The silly damned Prospitian.

The restaurant was a low but opulent grey building painted in stripes of brilliant colors with little rhyme or reason, as was the current style, and featured a prominent dance floor. A lovely young troll in a red and teal dress, her short, wavy hair up in a bun and red eyes burning vivaciously met them at the door. "Hey shorty," said Dave, acknowledging her with a nod.

"Ooh, I love it when you disrespect me," she snickered, voice dripping with irony.

"Atta girl," he responded. "This is John. He's Prospitian. He's cool I guess."

John stepped forward, a slight flush on his cheeks. He bent his head and kissed her hand. "The pleasure is all mine," he said with a nervous smile.

She laughed at him. "What a charmer you found yourself Dave! Are you going to make him your pale-pet?" She put her arm around John's shoulders and pressed him close, laughing as he became increasingly more uncomfortable. "I'm Terezi, by the way. Terezi Pyrope." She led them over to their table and sat John down with playful roughness.

"So," John began nervously, "pale, uh, pet. Yeah, I've heard of the other romances you guys have here."

"Shut up," said Dave. "Nobody wants to hear a Prospitian's opinion on alternate romance. Garçon!" He called for the waiter, and an irritated looking young troll brought them their menus.

"Isn't it rude to call Beforan waiters that?" asked John as he skimmed his menu, scooting very imperceptibly away from Terezi. "Roast duck please, monsieur," he said to the waiter.

"Don't show them respect," Dave drawled, "show them who's boss. I'll have the same thing," he said, glaring over his sunglasses. "And you'd best be quick about it or you'll know what the back of my hand tastes like."

Terezi let out a full throated cackle, revealing perfectly white, perfectly sharklike teeth. "Just a little sparkling rosé," she said, "The most intense red you have." The waiter turned to leave and she grabbed his sleeve before he'd advanced a single foot. "And I don't mean the good shit you drag out for foreigners and tourists, I mean the nasty stuff you only use for drowning grubs in before you cook them, because that's what I like," she finished with a smile that was more a baring of teeth than not.

"Trolls respect power and strength, and you need to act like you have both of those at all times," said Dave, tying a handkerchief around his neck. "If you go and call the waiters 'mister' instead of 'boy' and don't threaten them at least once, you get spit in your soup and bulge-stink on your entrée."

John nodded slowly, smiling. "I get it," he said. "I can't go around talking about traditions when I barely understand them."

Dave nodded and Terezi let out a satisfied sigh, leaning back in her chair. "Take this restaurant for example," she said, gesturing around vaguely with a gloved hand. "It's got a big dance floor, because it's a taxi-dancehall."

"A what now?" John was lost again.

"You buy a ticket to get to dance with a girl," said Dave. "Lonely men are flooding into the city what with the war and all, and a good woman makes up for a lot of shellshock."

John's eyes widened. "It's how I met Terezi actually."

John's eyes widened further still. "I used to work here," she added helpfully. "Dave was my first time."

John's eyes could not widen further so he began to blush instead. "He's really, really good," Terezi whispered.

"Okay, stop teasing him," Dave said, holding up his hand. "Look, when I sad dance, I didn't actually mean pail. Innuendos are lazy. Terezi was a dancer and only a dancer."

The waiter returned at that moment with the bottle of champagne and Terezi snatched it out of his hand and poured herself a glass. It was candy red, and the bubbles were like pink rubies. The smell of alcohol was so strong it probably killed the weaker grubs before they were drowned in it. She sniffed it delicately, enjoying the bouquet, swilled it around in the glass, listened to the bubbles pop, and then downed it in a single gulp. "You should try this John," she said with a wicked grin. "It'll make a man out of you."

"I don't drink," he began, and was met with a loud 'boo!' followed by having the bottle rammed into his mouth and the bubbly liquor forced down his throat. "There you go John," said Terezi, rubbing his throat to ease the fluid's way down, "Don't worry, this will give you the courage to ask me to dance."

He issued a panicked burp and choked on the rosé as Terezi cackled. Then she pulled him up out of his chair and dragged him to the dance floor. Dave watched them dance until the food came. Terezi was brilliant of course; she'd been the best dancer in the hall and he'd made a point of it to hire her as often as he could afford until she decided to cut out the middle man and just move in with him. John though, he was terrible. It might have just been the liquor, or perhaps a lack proper training. He seemed fleet enough on his feet, with a certain kind of rough grace, but he kept stumbling over himself like an idiot. Dave imagined his father had been a dancer and John had pointedly ignored his lessons. He appeared to at least have learned the steps by now; the band was playing something slow and jazzy and it was easy enough to dance to even for a newbie like Egbert. The two of them were getting closer together, finding a rhythm, talking quietly. Terezi laughed and it wasn't a cruel laugh. John's face was still red, but more endearingly so, and his smile more relaxed. What the fuck was he doing? Terezi was supposed to tease him and fluster him and make him uncomfortable, and here they were having a good time. Where did they get the gall? Well, she did like to play around; it may turn out she had simply wanted to fluster Dave instead. No, he knew her too well; she really was having a good time. What the hell was John saying to her?

Dave almost stood up, when his assistant Tavros ran into the restaurant, rushing past the doorman and stomping on a waiter's toes. "Uh, sir, you, uh, have a message from Derse," he said, trailing off instead of properly finishing.

Dave sighed. "Can't it wait?" he asked, pouring himself a tall glass of the rosé; "Some Prospitian's about to steal my girl and I allowed it."

"Uh," Tavros began, clearly hating the effort it took to sound confrontational, "I'm afraid it can't wait sir." He tremblingly held out his hand, laden with a scrap of telegraph paper. Dave quickly skimmed the message from Jack Noir, chief editor of the Archagent, Derse's leading newspaper. He'd learned quickly to filter out the insults and needless hyperbole and find the notes left by his second, Diamonds Droog. Apparently, Dave was being recalled to the capital after two long years of 'exile' to this war-torn backwater. But he didn't want to leave.

Dave removed his sunglasses to rub at the spot between his eyes. One damn thing after another. "Tell then I can't go back," he said slowly through grit teeth.

"I thought you liked Derse," Tavros muttered.

"I like it fine where it is, I don't need to be there!" he snapped. "Tell then," Dave repeated, "that I can't go back….Because," he was making this up as he went along, "I…have an interview with good old Colonel Scratch."

Tavros gasped. "R-really?" he asked.

"Not yet," said Dave. "Give me two weeks."

Two weeks later John and Dave sat huddled under a threadbare blanket in the muddy base of a tower in the middle of blue mangrove country. John's face was flushed with the beginnings of a cold, his big blue eyes watery as he gazed at Dave. He was trying to look him in the eyes but the man wore sunglasses even at night, and all John saw were his own eyes reflected back at him. "I hate you," John muttered.

"Your mom's cock is so big we could have used it to take out Scratch's entire army and established ourselves as dictators of Alternia," Dave muttered. "You would have taken the shitty North side and tried to impose your bullshit beliefs on everyone while I'd have had the cool South side and opened the region up to commerce and industry, becoming a world power within three generations. Thanks to your mom's dick," he explained, feeling the metaphor had gotten out of his hands. Just like John's mother's penis. That was a good one, he thought.

John groaned. "Look," he said. "Dave. I'm sorry."

"About what?" asked Dave. "The part where you followed me to my secret meeting with the crazy theocratic rebel leader who ritually maims people that defy him and thinks he's the devil and you know what the motherfucker's probably right, or the part where you waited in the back of my car and actually let them siphon my gas so you wouldn't get caught, or the part where you jumped out the rumble seat anyway just as I was pulling out and called them all barbarians and said that you would never support their murderous regime?"

John sighed tiredly. "The part where I stole your girlfriend from you."

Dave took off his shoe, figuring he'd be less likely to get trenchfoot this way, and threw it at John's face. "Ow," he said, rubbing his now broken nose. "Look, I just…I liked her from the first moment I met her—"

Dave threw his other shoe and knocked off John's glasses. "Asshole," he muttered, feeling around for them in the mud. Dave smirked. John threw a shoe at him, knocking off his vintage aviators. "Dammit I can't be seen without my glasses," he snapped, feeling around for them as well.

Somehow in the intervening minutes John wound up with them on his face. "Am I cool now?" he asked. Dave flipped him off and put on John's glasses. The fact that they made his eyes hurt like a bastard didn't mean anything to him. "Lemme tellya 'bout the third force. OMG the struggle."

"Anyway," John said, snorting a little with laughter and also with blood running down his throat, "Terezi. I'm sorry, but we're totally in love now. What you don't understand but she sees clearly is that I can provide for her! You're just having your fun and waiting to go back to Derse."

Dave smirked. The idiot didn't know what Dave had had to pull off to get out of going back to Derse. Well, he did, just not that Dave had done it for those specific reasons. "You think you're gonna take her back to Prospit? Get a nice little baroque house with a gold-picket fence and the appropriate number of kids? Get a Carapacian nanny called Marge who makes you guys pierogis every weekend? Take Terezi away from her friends and family and get her somewhere 'normal'?"

"Away from all this!" John shouted, waving his arm emphatically as a shell exploded outside. "They can't be breaking out the artillery just for us," John muttered.

"Nah," said Dave, as the *phwoom* of heavy raygun fire erupted from upstairs, accompanied by a hiss of steam as it cut through the rain. The tower was a good four stories tall, but the upper floors were reached by a well secured trap door. Try as they had, the people upstairs had refused to let the humans in up there. Now, they saw why. Another shell exploded much closer to the tower. "Let's get out," he said. "We'll walk and talk."

Just as they left, the second story of the tower erupted into flames, having been struck by an errant shell. They hit the floor to avoid debris and crawled through the mud as fast as they could, heading away from the raised road and into the marshy water from which the towering blue trees rose, their tangled mass of roots arching like the vaults of cathedrals. Dave went on. "Wow you are an arrogant fucker thinking you've got her around your little finger after one fucking dance."

"Not one dance. Every night since you left," John said seriously. "She says I'm the best there is now," he added wistfully. Dave glared. John couldn't see it through the dark lenses. "I told her I'd be good for her," John said. "I remember the exact words, that first night. 'Please forgive me if I seem naïve, I wouldn't want to force your hand, but please understand I'd be good for you. I don't always rush in like this, twenty seconds after saying hello—"

Dave groaned for John to shut up. "And she said," John added, ignoring him, "I hope you're not—" just before Dave shoved his face into the mud.

"Shut the fuck up and stay down," he hissed as a handful of soldier's in Scratch's blinding green and white uniforms rushed by shouting in Alternian. When they'd passed by, Dave hissed, "Since this is so fucking important to you, I'm gonna say it. Terezi is just playing around. Having some fun. She goes too far sometimes, like convincing dumb foreigners she wants to marry them, yeah, but what can I say? That's why I love her." Dave asked. In truth he was more than a little shaken up and wanted nothing more than to leave John here to die. "You haven't slept with her have you?"

John sputtered, expelling a glob of mud from his mouth. "Of course not! Classy lady like that you need to romance first." Dave started laughing and let John sit back up. The two of them started laughing together and they finally exchanged eyewear.

John rubbed the mud off his lenses, chuckles subsiding, just in time to see the very angry trolls in Scatch's colors turning back around. "Fuck," he said, shoving Dave into the water, "We'll meet up back in town," he said, demeanor becoming hard, posture shifting very slightly into a solid fighter's stance. "I'll distract them." He removed his blazer and started waving it around over his head, shouting some colorful expletives in Alternian trollish. They ran after him, firing off their lasers at random as he disappeared into the storm. Gunshots followed, old powder based weaponry. Normally that'd be as good as wielding a fucking war-hammer against a modern piece, but this way he could see them and they couldn't see him. Dave cursed John Egbert for a fool, but at least a good one, and one he'd never see again, and swam away through the murk.

"Ah! You're here!" said John, smiling as Dave walked into his own living room.

"Who the fuck let you in?" he asked. "How'd you come back from the dead?"

"That would be me," said Terezi, looking serious as she strode in from the other room.

"I didn't die," John said cheerfully. "I killed them!" he sneezed, a sound more likely to come from a sad puppy than a person claiming to have killed five trolls with inferior weaponry and a head cold.

"Oy vey," Dave said, rubbing his forehead, "the two of you are turning me old and Jewish." He sat down.

"Look," said John, "I came to tell Terezi that if anything ever happened to you, I would take care of her. That seems like a reasonable compromise, since you like running off to war zones and swimming in dark swamps. Can we still be friends?"

"I thought you hated me," Dave said.

John waved his hand dismissively. "Heat of the moment. It'll never happen again." Terezi chuckled.

Dave narrowed his eyes. "Can you believe this guy, 'rezi? Tell him he's a fucking idiot. Then we can go out and I'll get you that ruby necklace you've been wanting."

"It bears thinking about," she said with a coy little smile, hands meeting in front of her throat as if she really were some prim and proper lady and not the wild she-demon that clawed her way into his heart. "Aren't we still waiting on that divorce of yours?"

Dave groaned. Jade had stopped being able to determine reality from fiction ages ago and spent her time in a comfortable cell back on Derse, alternately painting on the walls, telling people she was banging the Sufferer, and thinking she was a werewolf. "You can't get a divorce from a madwoman," he said. "It's so impolite that it's actually illegal. I've petitioned the Queen for an annulment every year since I met you. We'll know in a few weeks if I've been approved."

"Well then," she said, smile growing predatory. "We'll see in a few weeks whether I'm playing or not." And with that, she stood up and walked out the door. Both men let out a frustrated sigh as they watched her go.

"Women," said John.

"Troll women specifically," said Dave. "Jade never gave me that much trouble, even now that she's grimbark crazy. And when she wanted role-reversal it didn't hurt nearly as much." John choked.

Dave smirked a little to himself and poured a glass of scotch. "Want some?" he asked, pouring another glass without waiting for an answer. John made a submissive gesture and took the glass. They clinked them together.

"To love, and to hate," said John.

"To that sweet ass," said Dave, turning his head to the door.

"That too," John added with an embarrassed chuckle.

Dave and Tavros were strolling down the street, heading home from the Archagent's branch headquarters, hoping to beat the afternoon rain. "So, uh, sir, I uh, hope you don't um," babbled Tavros over the sound of a nearby car backfiring. It was probably the third car Dave had seen in this city; the Imperial capital in contrast was like a goddamn exhibition, but that was another story.

"Spit it the fuck out," Dave said. "God damn, Tav you're like a brother to me but you need to take a speech class or something."

"What relief organization does Mr. Egbert work for?!" Tavros spat out, looking a bit winded from the effort of speaking so clearly.

Dave opened his mouth, then shut it. He had no fucking clue. And what relief organization hired men who carried old-fashioned firearms, and could kill squads of trolls in the dark? 'I will never support you,' he'd told Scratch. Or was it 'we'? There was something very intensely wrong with this picture, Dave was starting to realize. The car backfired again. "I think we need to—"

The car exploded.

The concussion knocked them both off their feet. Ears ringing, Dave stumbled to his feet, looking at the carnage all around him. The streets were muddied early, with a rainbow of troll blood. A highblood with a missing arm was barking orders to a pair of newly arrived legislacerators. A huge white cat leaking green was weeping over a prone, unmoving wiggler. The wounded tripped over the dead and dying, trying to escape the flames. The bomb had been a hearty mixture of concussive force and incendiaries, and the fire had already spread to the nearest building. A particular jade-blooded troll, a rare male with a Prospitian styled haircut, was standing near the conflagration looking stunned. John Egbert reached out from an alley and dragged the troll into it.

Dave went after them, taking care not to step on anything. He still managed to slip on a puddle of murky green and almost slam into a woman with a hideous burgundy gash in her stomach.

Covered in rainbow mud, he leaned against a wall and peered inside. John was shouting at the jadeblood, looking furious, slamming him against the wall. Dave's hearing was beginning to recover. "No one was supposed to get hurt!" he thought he heard. What?

"The bastard was in on it," said Dave. Tavros, looking as if he were about to shit himself, nodded. They were now at Dave's office on the second floor of his house. The smoke from the explosion rose up into the sky, right around the corner.

"He's no relief worker." Tavros, looking as if he had just shit himself, nodded.

Dave started pacing. "He's trying to…create a third force that will oppose the Beforans and Lord English. He followed me to find Scratch so that he could scope the guy out and see if he should support him. He decided not to. He implied he's not working alone and he can fight like a motherfucker. I think he's trying to get Prospit to be his third force. They're already blaming Lord English and his commies for this; it's just a matter of time before Prospit gets off its ass." Dave took a deep breath. "And I think he's a Problem Sleuth."

Tavros, smelling as if he had just shit himself, nodded. The Problem Sleuths were an elite fighting and intelligence gathering force specializing in infiltration and unconventional weapons, formed by Prospit at the end of the Second Great War. They'd been popping up everywhere in the last few decades, stirring up trouble wherever they went, all in the name of stopping Lord English. "We have to make sure," said Tavros, voice quiet.

Dave nodded. "I, uh, know some guys," said Tavros, rubbing the back of his head. "They could…take care of this thing."

"You mean kill him?" Dave snapped. Tavros shook his head emphatically. "No! Just, talk, I guess. These guys are, uh, professionals. And they have an interest in …keeping Prospit out of our country?"

Dave glared at Tavros. "Are you a fucking commie?" Tavros did not respond for a long while.

"Invite him over for drinks," he said at last, speaking very carefully. "Talk to him. You two seem pretty close—"

"I hate him," Dave insisted.

Tavros nodded. "I can tell. It'll be hard, um, for you to do this, but, if you think we should…question him, then when he leaves, put an open book over there," he said, pointing to a windowsill. "And, we'll see what we see." Tavros stood up, shaking, and stepped outside.

"So," said Dave, pouring himself another scotch. "Bombs."

Jake smiled uneasily. "I saw that. It was terrible."

"Then why did you smile?"

"I wish it had never happened!"

"No one was supposed to get hurt. Right?"

John stared at him with those big blue eyes. He stood up, and he wasn't his usual awkward self. He was the man from the night among the mangroves. "The Beforans can't hold on to Alternia. They don't have the brains, and they sure as fuck don't have the balls." He picked up his scotch and poured it into a nearby planter, the blue leaves withering slightly. "And I keep telling you bunch of alcoholics that I don't fucking drink." John stalked over to the window where Dave was meant to put the book.

Dave stood up and followed uneasily. This could end terribly. "Let's think for a fucking minute," John said. "When the Beforans take off, who's going to fill that void? The Alternians can't do it themselves; Scratch isn't a king, he's a butcher and probably a pedophile too. Maybe Derse could do it, if they could be bothered to give a shit about the world outside their borders anymore," he smiled slightly. "No offense."

"None taken," said Dave, picking up a book nonchalantly. Neophyte Redglare's 5096 Treatise on Law. He opened it up to a random passage and read it. "If any troll should willingly start a fire and be discovered, then he shall be thrown into the selfsame fire." He set it down on the windowsill.

John was still talking. "So either the communists move in and take over the wealth of Alternia, or Prospit builds it up as a buffer state. We need to stop the bastards here; taking Alternia leaves all the other Lands vulnerable to invasion. They'd probably just convert on the spot if that happened and then it's just our kingdoms against the fucking world!" John slammed his hand down on the windowsill and the wood bent just slightly. He was livid, face burning bright with rage.

John blinked, and he chuckled, almost embarrassedly. "It's awful. I know it's awful. We're trained to do awful things so other people won't have to, bearing the sins of the world on our shoulders until they finally wear us down, and then they stick us in unmarked graves." He chuckled again; the sound carried a sadness that Dave realized had always been there. "We just have the little pleasures in life. Good food, the love of a woman, friendship. Are we still friends?"

Dave almost choked. What the fuck…was this guy's deal? Look at him, he thought, just standing there, all insecure and flushed, suddenly so much smaller. That must be that Problem Sleuth training, how to seem innocuous, innocent even. How much of this guy's bullshit 'friendship' act was even real? Did he even like Terezi or was that all an act too? There was a slight wateriness in John's eyes. Was…was he serious? No, thought Dave, we are not friends. "Yeah," said Dave. John pulled him into an awkward hug.

"Thank you," he muttered into Dave's ear, slipping something into his pocket. Dave did the same, but he was much better at sleight of hand and John didn't even feel it. Then, a new spring in his step, he walked out the door.

Dave waited until he was sure he'd gone, and pulled out the thing. A king of diamonds. He walked, trembling, over to the book. He almost shut it. Instead he tore up the playing card and poured himself another scotch.

A week later, he and Terezi were curled up on his couch, enjoying some sparkling rosé in front of the fire. Rubies glinted at her throat and she unleashed a satisfied purr, nuzzling against him. The annulment had gone through. Dave had spent an entire two hours single, the time it took him to get the ruby necklace and propose. Sleepily, Terezi murmured, "Whatever happened to John Egbert? It's been almost a week, and he hasn't even congratulated us. That would be just like him, huh? Acknowledging you as the better man."

The interrogation had not gone well, or so Dave gathered. Tavros had gone missing, and a man called Rufioh was dead along with a wolf lusus the size of a small elephant.

John had been found in the River of Dew and Glass with a daggerlance in his kidney and an ace of spades in his pocket. "I'm sorry," Dave whispered.

Terezi chuckled. She'd picked that up from him, Dave realized. "For what?"

"I don't know," Dave lied. "I just felt the need to apologize to somebody."

Terezi kissed him. "Not to me. Never to me."

They say you come to Alternia and understand a lot in a few minutes; the rest has got to be lived. They say whatever it was you were looking for, you will find here. They say there is a thing called black romance, and if you taste it, it will burn in your stomach forever.

Author's Note: It seems I sank more ships than not. Such is the way of this fic. This first chapter was based on the novel The Quiet American, concerning the Vietnam War, though I drew more on the 2002 film to be honest. John here acts like fandom John as his CIA cover, is the joke. Feel free to throw me a ship and a scenario; there's more characters than I can count, after all.