I was on that stupid moon again in my stupid gray skin, with the stupid claws and the stupid horns and the stupid, stupid, stupid red blood. Then off in the distance I saw a girl. I'd seen the chess people and some of my friends as trolls, but never another human (I didn't care what I looked like. I was still human. You can call me trans-species or whatever, I'm sure Kankri would get a fucking kick out of it). I flew closer to her. She was beautiful with her flawless dark skin and long black hair, but her eyes drew me in.

No, that's not poetic language. I looked at her and they literally fucking sucked me in. I landed hard on an invisible surface somewhere in space.

"Fuck me."

She faded into view, still flying in front of me. "Sorry, Karkat! That was the only way to bring you here so we could talk! Otherwise I had the feeling you'd run away because you keep freaking out at John and not wanting to remember. You should probably work on that. Running's not like you at all!"

"Where, for fuck's sake, is here? And what the fuck did you do to physics?"

"You're in my mind now, in my dream. We're lucky I was taking a nap in the middle of the day!"

"Yeah, sure, lucky. Who are you anyway?"

"My name is Jade. John told me you were being kind of stubborn, so I was looking for you. Waiting for you to fall asleep."

"Couldn't you just talk to me on pesterchum or something? John keeps bugging me, so I know you'd be able to get my handle. You didn't fucking have to go all space-eyes on me and can you just put your goddamn feet on the goddamn floor? This place is giving me a headache as it is without your bouncing floaty shit."

She giggled. Bitch. "Sorry." But she did land. That didn't stop her from still being a bitch, though. At least from my point of view. "I didn't think of the pesterchum idea, but I like to talk to people face to face anyway!"

"Fucking- fine! So why are we here again?"

"Because I want to tell you to stop looking into this."

I blinked at her. "That… is the exact opposite of what I thought you'd say. Didn't you just say you wanted me to stop running away? Do you want me to be brave or not?"

"I do but- I really mean it Karkat. It's okay if John knows, if he remembers everything. But you can't. And you especially can't talk to your friends about this. If you all start to remember… I think even if five of you start to remember... Well, I just feel like bad stuff will start to happen!"

"So Eg-turd can know but I can't? That's bullshit!"

"Karkat, it's for your own good. I'll be telling John this too. But you had to be first. You have to not think about this. Just do school stuff. You can even be friends with John. But you cannot remember everything. You just can't."

"Well, you know what I have to say to that?"

"What?"

"Fuck you! I do what I want. And what I want to do right now is leave and there's nothing a nook-nuzzler like you can do to stop me."

"Karkat! No, oh please oh please no!"

But I didn't have time to listen, because before the last no was even all the way out I was staring up at my ceiling back in my room.

I saw Egbert the next morning bright and early in history of film. He was sitting there, doodling intensely. I stomped up to his desk and dropped my things loudly on the one next to him. He looked up and smiled at me.

"Hey, Karkat! How are you today?"

"What does Jade look like?"

"Huh?"

"Your cousin. What does she look like?"

"Um, kind of like me if I was a girl, but her face is kind of rounder and her hair is really long but sticks up a little on the top. Oh, and she's got these really, really green eyes."

I took a deep breath and placed my hands over my eyes. "Fuuuuuuuck."

"What is it?"

"She got in my head last night. Did some of her witch of space stuff and then yelled at me."

"For what?"

"Wondering if your stupid story is real or not."

"Why?"

"Who knows?" I rolled my eyes. "The bulge-muncher didn't tell me."

"The what?"

"Bitch."

"That's not what you said." He stood up and hugged me. "You're starting to remember, Karkat, you're really starting to-"

"Get the fuck off of me!" I wedged my hands between the two of us and shoved him away. "Dammit, John, I can't be who you think I am!"

"And now you called me John!"

I clenched my jaw. "It's because I'm too pissed off to speak straight. You and your dimension-hopping cousin-sister-whatever can both go fuck yourselves!"

I picked up my bag and stalked to the other side of the room. I tried not to look at the asshole. I didn't want to give him the satisfaction, but I kept looking out of the corner of my eye. It was hard to tell if he was happy or sad. The smile was still on his face and hinted at in his eyes, but there was something sad about it too, mixed with the kind of fondness you'd show a guardian or friend you never got to see.

It made me feel all weird, tugging at my heart and my memories. Why did both of us have to have such stupid human emotions? I never had those kinds of feelings as a troll. In my dreams. Only in the dreams. If it had been real, it would have gotten complicated and confusing in a whole different kind of way. That quadrant shit makes no sense.

But there was no way it was real. And just to prove it, I was going to talk to all of my friends. I'd tell them everything. And there was nothing John- Egbert and Jade could do to stop me.

(Besides, if it was true, I had to know. I needed more than glimpses of the man- the troll I'd been.)

My chance would come the next day. Thursdays were special for my friends and me. We weren't sure why but we'd always go to one of our houses and just be there, sitting together and holding each other. Since elementary school when we first met it had been a tradition. I wish I'd thought to question it before. To ask why we'd all gathered like that when sometimes we could barely stand each other.

But I needed time to plan, to think about how I was going to pitch this idea, the big-ass story. I didn't want them to think I was crazy. I wanted them to believe me, to remember what was starting to seep back into my head, or else to completely and totally crush me so that I didn't have a fucking ounce of gray matter entertaining the idea of another life. John's story was pretty good, but I wanted it to be from my perspective. If I wanted to convince those hardass friends of mine I needed to be genuine. There was only one piece I was missing. They'd want to know how we ended up here. Especially the ones that had died.

Like I said earlier, I'm not superstitious. I don't like having faith in things I can't see and touch for myself. That shit's for slimy pink babies. But old habits die hard, and Kankri had given me a little token when I was still that little. He was an old stuffed lobster. He had no name, no illusion of sentience, but he was still comforting. When I was little I'd have night terrors all the time. I'd wake up screaming and flailing and afraid of metal men coming from the sky to cull me. So Kankri gave me this lobster and he'd been my charm. In my dreams I'd made him big and white and he protected me, even if he was kind of scary too.

As years went by I learned about lusii through my dreams and even awake I started to think of him like that: my guardian for when I slept. As I turned him over in my hands that night I wondered if Kankri had a similar guardian when he was a troll, if he just sensed the connection to lobsters, or if it was a coincidence. That night I didn't want to think that I made my lusus to match the stuffed animal, but I really didn't know.

"There's one thing missing," I whispered to him. "I don't know how we got here. My guardian- my Lusus- please show me." I kissed him between his tiny plastic eyes and curled around him.

I tried too hard to sleep and to dream. I stayed up half of the night, staring at the ceiling, hoping to pass out. The clock ticked past midnight, one, two, three-

Four loud rings reverberated through what was left of time and space. We- the survivors stood over Lord English's dead body. All of us were drenched in his red, red blood. I saw the time and space players trying desperately to close the tears. But there was nothing to do. We'd beat him, but broken the game in the process. The rifts in reality were too big and only getting bigger. The rest of us held each other tightly, shivering on our shrinking piece of ground. We knew there was nothing that could be done.

Then there was this big white house shape- four quadrants with a roof on it- flying right towards us. John was next to me and we squeezed each other the tightest. But he suddenly laughed.

"Guys," he said, "I think we're gonna be okay."

"That's it. The fucker's finally lost his last ounce of sanity."

The house hit us.

"I'm not crazy, Karkat. This already happened to me once."

That was the last coherent thought I heard before my body was taken apart atom by atom. It didn't hurt, per se. It was just weird. Bits of me were sucked away, becoming not-me. Then I was everyone and everything. Going over the memory again and again I don't know if I can put it into words. It wasn't like I could hear everyone's thoughts, or suddenly knew what it was like to be a tree or anything. There was just peace, comfort.

The closest thing I can think of to it is when you're swimming in the ocean or a big enough lake and you're just letting the waves gently rock you. You close your eyes and then there's just the coolness and the motion and the bubbling noise of live water. And then you just don't think. But here there wasn't even the separation between the water and sky, there was no air to breathe in and no lungs to put them into. Everything was just part of one big wide, white hum.

Then after an eternity or a second – when space-time has reached absolute singularity you can't tell the difference – it faded to darkness. Slowly I felt warmth creeping in, a new space growing ever tighter around a new body. As I realized I was being pulled from all of that I felt so, so sad. I wanted to reach out, to find everyone and bring them back to me. I wanted to cry, but couldn't.

One day I felt pain again on top of the separation. Then I lost the warmth and wet too, and I was cold and dry and something rough was rubbing my skin. I took a first breath of air, but by the time I started screaming I forgot why I was so miserable.

I let myself wake up then. I knew the story well enough from there, and I knew the angle I wanted to use to shoot my prologue for my friends.

I had to wait until we were well into our cuddle session. I was pretty sure that they knew something was wrong, but if I'd started earlier they would probably laugh at me or brush me off.

"Do you ever think about the afterlife?" I asked softly.

"I think we all do, brother," Gamzee said softly. "It's normal to think about what's going to happen after all this. Why d'ya ask?"

"That's not what I meant. What if this is the afterlife? What if we were somewhere else first?"

"Like everyone being in purgatory?"

"No."

They were all listening closely then, even if they weren't all turned towards me. Having eleven people you really fucking care about listen when you were going to do something so fucking stupid that you're better off shoving your face on a barbeque is bad, real bad. I wanted to freeze, hide so that I could still be the same Karkat to them when all of this was over. But then my damn motor mouth acted up.

"Like, and this is totally just hypothetical here, what if we used to not be human? What if we were these grey creatures with fangs and horns who lived on a planet called Alternia and were sorted into rank by blood color and wore shirts with our astrological symbols on them in our blood color and our parents were all out conquering the universe so we were raised by these white monsters called Lusii and then one day this game called Sgrub came out and we all played it, but it wasn't just a normal video game and it altered reality and our universe was destroyed so through the game we made a new one but I gave it cancer, and even though we won we didn't get our reward because the people in the next universe created a scratch and then we all spent three years passing through dreams and meeting dead people to get to another universe so we could fix everything and then kill some monsters and then break the game and then have a singularity and then wind up here."

"That-" Terezi said, "That's pretty specific for a hypothetical."

Kanaya was pretty far away from me in the pile, but she reached out to me. She lifted one of her soft, slender hands and placed it on my cheek.

"You have the dreams too."

I nodded.

"Do you mean-?" Terezi asked.

"They do," Aradia said.

I looked around and saw the expressions on their faces: the knowledge, the understanding. I closed my eyes and sank back into Terezi and Gamzee, taking their hands in mine. A tear or two leaked out of my eyes as I sat with my family of two lifetimes.

Then I heard a crack.