He's been here before. This rooftop, this day, it feels so familiar.
The sweltering heat pools into room overwhelmingly, and the breeze of a single fan does it no justice. The rumbling in the sky looms overhead. He's known for years that this was going to happen. He's been awake for years. As the door to the apartment shuts behind him, he strides dutifully to the elevator. The stairs had always been reminiscent of something cold, and always sent dark tinges up his spine, though he would never admit it.
Everything today just seems so god damn familiar, and it wasn't just his dream self thinking. The heat pressing upon Dirk's body felt thick and heavy, adding to the necessity of the task at hand and countering his cool expression as the elevator ascended. He had expected the feeling of control, but was perturbed by the traces of fondness. It wasn't that he hadn't been to the roof before. He had, many times, before his bro died… and many times after. But this nagging feeling, it was different somehow. He feels expectant of someone.
The elevator dings, and he is once again, on the familiar rooftop. The sky overhead, now covered by blinding meteors, glows faintly red and orange, and time has become scarce. But Dirk makes no rush to the lathe. He's well prepared.
The illuminated purple rooms of the tower grow small as he casually floats away. Just because there was an assassination attempt on him doesn't mean that he gives any more of a fuck. He spits the blood out to his side as he closes in on Roxy's dreamself. Sure she was difficult to keep track of, and her constant inebriation really made things no better, but she was still his friend and his sister, if only by some derivation of an ectobiological experiment.
Her eyes were closed and her face had set calmly as she floated toward paradox space, a place that was surely empty until the far reaches where only the most horrible of monsters existed. Normally, he wouldn't risk letting her go out there, but there was just something, something like the alpha timeline almost pushing him go let her go, and to follow her, and a Strider always trusts their instincts because they're always right.
He tells himself that he's doing it for Roxy's sake, but somewhere deep down, he knows it's not.
They pass through terrains of hilly tundra and tropical islands, where gray skinned people with strange orange projections from their heads stare blankly with no corneas, but in their general direction. They float further and further out into dead space, nothing but space. Until, they see Rose.
And it strikes him, the aching familiarity tugging him stronger than ever. How did he know? She's Rose. It was so crystal clear, yet was the name of someone he's never met.
His conscience swims and lap around. He's used to multitasking and his cerebral abilities far exceed that of anyone he's ever met before, yet the feeling just leaves him high and dry of answers. The weaker and unfamiliar feeling of disappointment creeps into his head. It just seems so obvious.
Yet, even as his mind muses over this issue, he stays aware enough to notice that the girl he identified as Rose wasn't alone. And as Roxy disappears suddenly, his mouth parts just the slightest bit.
"Hey," the boy in the red cloak and cape coolly speaks.
And suddenly, it's all back, but it's not. He just knows that this is his child, or maybe his little bro. He feels yet another first, as a lump build up in his throat, and somehow he just wants to pull the child a little younger than him into an unironic embrace. And he wants to say how much he misses him, how much he misses… Dave.
And it makes no sense to him, but tragedy just pulls at him and he feels like all of the sudden, that he may not have been the best bro. Tears threaten beneath his lids, and he was glad for the protection of his shade, because his eyes were filmed over, and he just has an urge to say something, anything.
Finally, with an embarrassing break in finesse, he croaks out that he is sorry. Sure, his voice held no indication of a tremble, and cracked only slightly, but from the subtle turn of Dave lips, he knew that the lump he held back in his throat didn't go unnoticed.
Dave stares at him from behind his shades, and even though his contact with his older bro was minimal at best, there was an unspoken bond when the two silently exchanged glances. But this glance lasted too long. It was a sand pit, and they were falling.
At last, Dave let out a sigh and murmured, "You did the best you could."
And for the first time, Dirk felt released, as if Betty Crocker had put a curse over him when he fell from that meteor sixteen long years ago, and it was finally being broken by the few words muttered, almost arbitrarily to anyone else who may have heard, but beautiful in his ears.
He closes his eyes, and somehow he wakes up in his room without recalling ever having fallen asleep. His Derse body was awake even when he was sleeping, but somehow the grasp isn't there, and his dreamself isn't awake. But, he's not worried. Though there is little that is clear to him about his son, he just knows that everything will be okay. He reprimands himself a little for being so excruciatingly sentimental, but it would be okay.