The thing about Jake English, you think to yourself as you throw down another shot of Roxy's Mom/Daughter's bootleg vodka, is that he is a very physical person.
It was a part of what attracted you to him in the first place, despite the distance and time that separated the two of you.
Tonight is a night for thinking about things. Complicated things, sad things, happy things.
Things that are gone.
(Like Jake)
Things that will come back.
(Also, like Jake)
It's the night after the end of The Game and the troll's meteor has been safely crashed into your new planet. Everyone is celebrating as best they can. You are alive (some of you), and The Game is done. Lord English is dead, and you are all gods.
Jake English is also dead.
And that, you think as you pound back the seventh (?) shot of the night, is a reason to drink.
Even though you know he's coming back.
Because that's the thing about winning The Game. The Game is a bitch, no one will argue that. But it also has a weird way of playing "fair". If a team wins, everyone wins. If a team loses, everyone loses.
Your team won, and your dead have already begun to return to you. Some crazy cat-troll chick already popped up, and she's sitting beside you, also staring out into the dark.
She doesn't remember how she got back, when you ask.
She is also waiting for someone. You're pretty sure its that poor fuck who got stuck with AR in the sprite body, the sweaty dude with a healthy appreciation of horses and a muscle fetish. Equius- you're pretty sure that's his name. But you're not quite sure if the troll sitting on the rock out-crop next to you is Feferi or Nepeta. You're almost certain she told you.
But that was at least four shots ago, and right now your mind is all haze and Jake fucking English.
In your hands you're holding Jake's sylladex. You took it off his corpse before he vanished off the Battlefield. Other bodies (Jade, Gamzee, that blind troll who likes licking your brother) had disappeared before his, and you wanted to make sure that he, at least, got to keep his crap. You don't trust The Game any further than you can throw it. And considering its part abstract concept, that's not very far.
You down your eighth and likely final shot of the night, and excuse yourself to cat-girl. You wander off in the direction of one of the less occupied parts of the troll/human campsite. You nod coolly to your little/big brother as you pass. He's talking to lil' Lalonde, sneaking glances at the forest every fifteen seconds. You're pretty sure you know who he's waiting for.
You go find yourself a lonely corner, and you start to un-pack Jake's sylladex.
It's a slow process, and you linger over every item as you unpack them. You linger over some more than others.
These are the things you find:
One pair of lumpy socks, worn and obviously hand-knitted. You're pretty sure alternate universe Lalonde is the knitter of her group, and you're glad you can rely on her skills instead of Grandma English's. The socks are a horrid Kelly green and lumpy as hell. You know with utter certainty that Jake adores them.
Two broken computers. You're not sure why Jake is hauling these around. You know his grandma had her thing about computers, but Jake English, bless his heart, is not a tech guy. He had no chance of fixing these. You suppose they could be another reminder of his grandma, something physical for him to cling to in the long years in the jungle.
Next you find a skull and piece of grist, the remains of the first monster Jake killed in the game. The minions honestly weren't that tough in comparison to the monsters he used to fight on his islad, but he was proud of himself that day. He'd almost gotten the two of you killed when he turned around to hug you mid-strife.
You smile a little more than you should at the memory. He always was such a careless fucking dork.
Is.
Is a careless fucking dork.
You dig deeper into the sylladex, cursing yourself. No past tenses here, no siree. Jake may be the Page of Hope but you've got your own store of it, and now that the game's done most of it's invested in seeing him again.
You don't find any notes or diaries, but then again you didn't expect to. Jake was (is is is) terrible when it came to words. He always said too little.
You refuse to think, guilt crawling up into your stomach, about how you were an accomplice in establishing that particular trait.
Before you'd made AR Jake had actually been a pretty open communicator. You don't like thinking about how differently things might have gone, if Lil Hal and Jake had never met.
The next thing you find sends your stomach sinking.
Jake's an even worse artist than you are, but there's no mistaking the identity of the triangle shades on this crumbled piece of paper, or the identity of the green stick figure unloading two pistols into their lenses.
One of the greatest regrets you have is not figuring out early on how much having his conversations with you turning out to be with some AI had hurt your and Jake's friendship. When you refused to turn AR off you should have at least made him unable to talk to Jake. Roxy and Jane can handle that fucker, but that's partially because they aren't the object of AR's source material's slightly obsessive affections.
Okay, more than slightly. Looking back after having learned how to actually interact with people, you can see how, well, fucking creepy you used to be. What kind of a thirteen year-old builds a robot to beat-up and occasionally molesta-cuddle his crush?
The point that you bring yourself to contemplate, and it is a point that has been punching you repeatedly in the guts since the day you figured out just how much Hal had been fucking with you, is that Jake had learned over the years not to talk to you. Chat, yeah. But he learned through experience (experiences you were perfectly aware of but saw as harmless teasing instead of as what they were) to associate talking openly to you about sensitive shit with getting burned and humiliated.
It's really no wonder that communication issues became the bulk of your relationship problems.
The next item you find (after crumbling up the picture and putting it in your pocket for reasons you can't fathom; as a reminder, maybe) is a happier memory.
It's Jake's gasmask, the one he wore with you when you explored your lands together. The one he would let you slip off for a few seconds to get at his mouth, the thrill of kissing him heightened by the threat of the gas. You'd lean over at peaceful moments and pluck off his mask, lean in to seal his mouth to yours before he could gasp in poison from the surprise.
It was great while it lasted. And he loved it too, he had to have. Because it was one of the last things he allowed between the two of you that made you Dirk'n'Jake instead of Jake and Dirk. The day he pushed you away when you reached for his mask, absconding moments later, was the day you first realized that you might not be able to make him love you the way you loved him.
You know for a fact that you didn't inhale any gas that day. You didn't get the chance. But, watching him disappear over the ridge line, you wouldn't have been able to tell. Your whole body had burned. Your eyes had felt hot and red and you'd refused to identify the wetness you felt against your cheeks as anything but sweat, the ache in your lungs as anything but noble gas exposure.
You place the gas mask down next to you, mood soured. You dig in further into Jake's sylladex, looking for a memory that isn't quite as bitter-sweet to swallow.
Your next discovery actually makes you blush.
It's a rubbing from one of the walls in your tombs. Jake had been obsessed with taking the things, pausing you practically every hour so he could get an imprint of one of the "dandy" inscriptions that littered the place.
You remember this one espeicially, heat rising in your cheeks, because of the reason he had taken it.
It was the first time you'd ever really touched each other before, down there.
You'd just finished off an enormous minion and you were both exhilarated and high as hell on victory. So you'd pressed him up against a wall and kissed the hell out of him. Kissing lead to groping and groping lead to your hands around each other's cocks and Jake panting your name in your ear while he wrapped his thighs around your waist and let you hump him into the stone.
When you were sweaty, finished messes he'd pulled out his stupid little parchment pad and crayons and grinned at you, saying something along the lines of "what better way to make this momentous occasion, old chap, than to take a piece of the place with us?" You'd called him an idiot, pushed him to the ground, and kissed him senseless. He'd just laughed, the dork, and taken the rubbing anyway.
You turn the rubbing over, and proceed to laugh hysterically into your fist when you find what you were looking for. In his messy writing is scrawled the words "Virgins No More!", with two crapily drawn stick figures holding hands. One has what are unmistakably buck teeth, and the other has what looks like a well-meaning but poor attempt at your hair.
You carefully captchalog the drawing, rolling it up to protect the writing. You'll give it back to him if (when) he makes it back. But only if he asks for it.
You continue your rummaging, coming across an assortment of all the things that make up Jake English.
Some are things that belong solely to him, like his first set of pistols and the shell of the first round he ever fired, hung on a leather cord. He somehow managed to cram his entire movie poster collection into here, and you find yourself shaking your head in fond exasperation at the over-abundance of blue alien chicks.
(You decidedly don't think of a certain blue alien chick, gone now and forever after you sliced that fucking ring of her finger for daring to hurt Jake the way she did)
You find other things, things that link him back to Jane and Roxy. Sometimes it's easy for you to forget that never, not even in your closest moments, did he belong just to you. He loved everyone, and you all loved him back. You pull out and set aside one of Jane's favorite wooden spoons, a couple of boxes of cake mix and a bag of fake mustaches. Further down you find an as-of-yet unopened programming textbook and a disturbing collection of cat-skulls.
You come across a first aid kit you just now realize you don't know where he learned to use. It'd come in use a lot during the game, and Jake had acted as a sort of unofficial medic for your team. At the time you'd dismissed it as a side-effect of growing up on Hell Murder Island, something simple that'd he'd learned from necessity.
Except it turns out medicine isn't that simple.
You'd learned that hard truth just two days ago, when Jake had bled out under your hands no matter how many bandages you'd wrapped around his wounds or how much pressure you' put against the gaping hole in his chest.
The scar on your stomach, where you'd been gored by one of the larger minions during your first week in the mdeium, an injury that had almost cost you your last life, twinges. You half remember floating in and out of consciousness while Jake's warm hands worked you over, sewing you shut with delicacy and precision you hadn't realized he was capable of.
But then.
There were a lot of things you'd never realized about Jake English. Many of them because you'd been too caught-up in your image of him to actually take in the equally socially awkward jungle kid who was just as scared and alone as you'd been.
Swallowing and feeling empty again, you place Jake's medical bag aside, resolving to look it over later. You need to know how to use it, in case he's injured when he finally shows up.
You dig out a few more things that bring some of the warmth back to your chest. A large blanket the four of you had slept out on your first couple of weeks in the game, before you'd started splitting off into teams. A cook set, an extra pair of boots, some of his spare clothes. You surreptitiously take one of the shirts, tucking it under your arm. You're blushing again, like some teenage girl clinging to her boyfriend's old jersey when he leaves her for college.
You need less out dated metaphors.
You're about half-way though the sylladex (and damn. How did you never realize English was such a pack-rat?) when your heart stops in your chest.
It's a big piece of scrap metal, taking up a good chunk of space.
Except it's not just any hunk of scrap metal, it's Brobot.
Well, what's left of him anyway.
You stare in something that would justifiably be called dumb shock on anyone's face but yours. You can't believe Jake kept him. Jake had always said he'd hated Brobot. He'd always complained about how the bot would ambush him out of nowhere and beat the hell out of him, then turn around and be all protective of him against the monsters he'd been fighting on his own since he was four.
But there's a niggling in the back of your mind, a half-remembered conversation when Jake had thanked you for sending him Brobot. And-
And when he'd asked if you robots felt love.
You'd said no, of course. Hal was the most advanced AI ever built, and even he had trouble with emotions like love. Brobot had been no-where near that advanced. You'd asked him why he'd want to know a thing like that. Jokingly, you'd teased that maybe he was regretting getting stuck with the flesh and blood Strider over the metal one.
He's gone unusually soft at that. It was one of the only times he's ever kissed you first. It was gentle, and nice, and it'd left you confused as hell.
And now it makes you really happy, because it you're just now realizing it meant that Brobot hadn't fucked it up the way you and Brain Ghost Dirk and Lil Hal had.
That at least one version of you had made Jake happy.
By the time you're done rummaging you've amassed a small trove and everything around you smells like Jake. It makes you warm inside and it makes your heart ache more than it should.
It's just stuff. Jake's not back. It's just his stuff, physical leftovers and reminders that Jake English existed (exists) in this universe.
It shouldn't get to you like this.
But Jake English has never been an easy thing to deal with. Your eyes shouldn't water because of these reminders of his presence, his scent, and his clothes- all the random, precious and pointless crap he used to haul around with him.
But they do. Because it all reminds you how much you miss him. How long it's been since you've spoken to him.
The last thing you ever told him was that it's over, and you're illogically terrified that he won't be coming home. That you'll never get the chance to take it back.
Because life with Jake English is confusing and difficult and frustrating as fuck.
But one month without him has been worse than the first twelve years of isolation in the middle of your ocean.
So you sit in your stolen trove, holding his shirt close to your face like some otaku creep. You look ridiculous.
You find that you don't care.
You find yourself cramming your haul into your own sylladex and wandering back to the main camp area. Roxy and Jane are already curled up together in one of the trolls' weird pile things. You settle down next to Roxy, who blinks up sleepily at you and tugs half the blanket over herself and Jane. Warmth secured, she grabs your arm and tugs you in with them.
You go to sleep to the sound of her and Jane's breathing and the smell of Jake's shirt trapped between your side and the lumpy pile of dragon plushies that makes up tonight's bed.
When you wake up the next morning it's to a killer hangover and the sound of some goof with a dorky accent asking one of the trolls where his chums are, and you tackle him into the ground.
He hugs you back tightly, and you bury your head in the crook of his neck and try to pretend that the only reason you can't breathe are his arms wrapped tightly around your chest. You thank whoever's listening that Jake English is a physical person.
Because you're so happy right now you can't say a word.