Jade followed Jack through the maze of the lab, images of Dave's limp, and unmoving body on the cold floor of the meteor flashing through her head. She could not breath, because if she did she would cry. She would scream. She would be broken, and she could not let it happen, so she bit her lip until blood dripped down her chin and neck. That was what this game was doing to them all. She had never wanted to be a fighter. She had played at guns and marksmanship, but when it came down to it she just wanted to be warm and happy with Bec and her friends. All of those dreams were poisoned with the image of blood;
blood and blood and his beautiful broken body.
She had to stop it.
Dave did not come back effortlessly the way that Jade had. He woke up gasping and panicking, a dull pain still shooting through his pale body as he lurched himself forward. Almost immediately, two long, thin arms reached out to steady him and for a fleeting moment, he thought it was Jade. Once he focused he could see the skin was gray, and the face looking worriedly back into his was Terezi's. He quickly lowered his face and his blonde hair fell in front of it protectively as he registered the absence of his trademark shades. He fought with himself to calm, almost immediately regaining his impassive appearance, but it was undermined by the expression in his wide red eyes which he had never been able to control with much success.
"The hell happened?" he asked, eyes focused intently on the dried blood on the floor beneath him. Everything after Jade had teleported him was muddled.
"You uh, checked out there for a bit, cool kid." She said with a weirdly controlled expression.
"I 'checked out'? Jegus, Terezi. You mean I passed out?" he scooted back a few feet so he could lean against the cold gray wall behind him.
"I think, probably, a little more serious than that." She was not wearing her own shirt. He realized it as she took a seat next to him. His shoulder was wrapped in black torn shreds of cloth that he assumed used to be the conspicuously absent shirt. It was stiff with dried blood, as was most of the left side of his body. He was, he realized, barely wearing anything at all. He found that he did not care much. His head was still trying to catch up with everything that was going on.
"So I..." and then it hit him, and he almost laughed at how stupid it seemed. "Seriously."
"Well you're better now!" and she grinned that crazy grin, all teeth haloed by her black lips, and it made the weird anxiety in his stomach recede a bit at the familiarity. "Took you a long enough time to wake up. I was starting to worry you might not." Her grin faltered for a split second as she finished.
"Where is… anyone else? I would think there would be a whole mess of teary-eyed faces surrounding me, waiting for the blessed resurrection." He joked mildly, his mouth a taut, straight line.
"Well, Jack…"
"Fuck." He pressed his hand against the wall to support himself and stood up quickly, his expression slightly frantic for a moment as he moved away from the gaping troll girl. "Fuck. How the fuck." How the fuck did I forget? "You're not fighting?"
"I was watching you, Dave." She answered, standing up and walking to him.
He paused, and he stared at Terezi, trying to read her expression. "I have to go." He turned to leave the room, finally recognizing his surroundings as his mind sped up, everything coming back to him in disorienting bursts. There was a nervous twisting in his stomach as he thought of his friends; as he thought of Jade. He told himself not to worry; told himself that Noir would never hurt her. That didn't keep her safe before, though.
"No." Terezi said, and he paused for a second at her voice, but not for long. He continued then, feeling his stiff limbs stretching as he began to sprint out of the room, trying his best to picture the path back out of the lab from where he was. He was surprised when he heard her following him, her shoes pattering along the hard floor.
He was downright startled when she tackled him.
She shoved her bony elbow against the back of his neck, and he could have thrown her off but as his shoulder made contact with the floor he nearly cried as a searing pain shot through his body. He cursed under his breath, once he found it again.
"Dave. You do realize that you were just DEAD? Are you really that eager to make it permanent?" she was snarling at him, and he could not see her but he could picture those sharp teeth punctuating her fury. He was nearly shaking with anger, himself. He wanted her to let him the fuck go. He breathed calmingly through his clenched teeth as he waited for the pain to recede, and he did not answer her. He just could not make himself care about his own safety. Admittedly, he was not really trying very hard. "Is it as hard as it seems to convince you that we care about you? That our lives would be notably worse if you were to go and get yourself heroically offed?"
"I fucking know…"
"NO. You don't, Dave. This isn't just with Jade. It's like you're always all too willing to put yourself in front of the proverbial bullet." She took some pressure off of him, and he turned halfway to face her as she continued to straddle him. "You want to die, cool kid? I'm sure Jade would be pretty crushed to learn that she was used as the excuse for your noble fucking suicide." He did not want to hear it. He wanted her to stop. Then he saw the teal tears clinging to the edges of her red eyes, and just like that he did not want to fight anymore. She was shaking as he pushed himself into a sitting position and wrapped his long arms around her, his face buried in her hair.
"Sorry, TZ. I don't, I'm just a reckless idiot. Alright? I'm sorry." He squeezed her tighter as he felt her hands brush the bare skin of his back.
"You fucking scared me, cool kid." She said softly. "Even scared my fuckass of a Matesprit."
He tensed up at that. "He was with Jade, I remember him leaving. I specifically remember making him leave while I was still good and breathing." He pulled away from her and looked her in the face.
"He came back… Jade too, but just for a-"
"Wait. She was here." His heart was thumping hard in his throat. "While I was ostensibly dead."
"Yeah. Okay we might benefit from finding her, actually."
"You gogdamn genius."
"Jade! Jade just WAIT a fucking second!" Karkat had run after her almost immediately after she had disappeared, and now that he finally found her he was not about to let her give him the slip again.
She stopped running a moment and turned to face him, her cheeks flushed and her green eyes wide and rimmed with red. "What! What could you possibly need to say to me right now?" She was shouting, but he did not let it phase him.
"Strider will be…"
"I know! Okay? Thanks, but I know. The fact is that so far we've been lucky, and calling him lying on the damn floor in a pool of blood DEAD is a FAR CRY from what most sane people would consider LUCKY. So I'm ending this."
He walked slowly toward her with his hands up in a surrender-type gesture. "That's good, that's fine. Go, Harley! And all that. But you need to calm the fuck down if you want to be able to kill that thing."
"I'm calm!"
"Really? Looks like you're fucking bawling your eyes out to me!" She stared at him for a moment before reaching up to her face and began rubbing the tears away from her eyes. The anger and sorrow in her expression was only becoming more pronounced as she threatened to rub her skin raw.
"Auuugh. Karkat! We don't have time!" she shouted in desperation.
"We have time for THIS." He said in a tone of finality. "Now. Just. Breathe." She stared at him, and took a deep shuddering breath. He moved slowly toward her, and she did not back away. He touched her on her shoulders tentatively, and when she did not protest he gently wrapped his arms around her, his hand stroking her hair absently as she cried into his black shirt.
Dave's muscles burned as he ran down the dark corridors of the lab, he and Terezi listening for any sounds that would let them know where anyone was. He had not captchalogued any extra clothes. The last three years had made him lax about what he kept on him, so Terezi had given him some of Karkat's black pants to throw on over his bare legs.
"Dave! I smell blood!" Terezi shouted, and his stomach clenched but he kept his cool as he ran toward the sound of her voice.
"Color?" he yelled back at her, thinking it might be one of the other trolls.
"Candy apple red." She said as he rounded a corner to find her hunched over a long streak of bloodstain on the ground, pressing some of it between two long gray fingers.
"You gunna fucking eat that?" he asked.
"What, you want it?" she asked, a glint of white teeth in the dim light.
"Don't fuck with me." He said, and his heart was beating way too fast. He tried to push it down. "Any idea…"
"It's Karkat. But he was wounded when I last saw him. Though if it's from that… looks like he was dragged across the floor. By his face." She frowned a bit at the last word.
"That's just the best news." He turned to run again, but Terezi's voice stopped him.
"I can smell their trail, Dave. They went this way." Without hesitation he turned around and saw her running again in the opposite direction. He silently followed.
It took him a moment to realize that they were heading closer and closer to the exit, and he was glad because fighting in cramped spaces was significantly more challenging than out in the open, where at least he could dodge without having to be wary of the walls. As they entered into the open air out on the surface of the meteor, the first thing he saw was Kanaya cutting through a huge slew of ogres with her buzzing chainsaw, a slightly insane look on her glowing white face. (He wondered idly where the fuck all of the minions and ogres were coming from, but then he decided that it was probably just shenanigans.) Rose was above her, but he could not tell what she was focused on. His sword was already in his hands as he ran forward, and began taking out as many low level enemies as he could reach while searching the sky for a sign of Noir.
He did not have to search long as he registered the green lightening show above the hull of the broken golden ship. He ran toward it, keeping his eyes to the sky and his sword ready for any adversaries he encountered. As he got closer, he saw Noir, PM, and Jade all above the ship, and they were moving about wildly. To his surprise, Jade had her rifle out, and instead of merely manipulating Noir as she had gotten into the habit of doing, she was attacking him relentlessly. She would reach out to hold him when he tried to teleport, but then she would, herself, flicker in and out, getting close enough to graze his carapace with the muzzle of her gun and shoot spatters of his red blood into the open air.
John was on the ground below them, and next to him was Karkat, a stream of red blood against the side of his face but still seeming relatively unharmed as he danced gracefully with his sickle in hand. He ran to them, and when Karkat looked up at him there was a very obvious look of relief on his face.
"About fuckin' time, Strider."
He was about to respond when PM came crashing down from the sky.
Jade watched helplessly as Noir used his power to pitch PM hard against the ground. Until that point he had never laid a hand on either of them, merely focusing on the defensive, but they were chipping hard away at his health and his anger had flashed in an alarming blaze. As her eyes followed PM down, she saw Dave there, his eyes uncovered but directed away from her. She felt a knot in her throat as she stared at him, and then a little too late realized that Noir was using the chance to flee the battlefield again.
She only had a few seconds to make her decision. All she knew was that at that moment everyone she loved was still breathing, and she was going to keep it that way. For a moment before she turned to follow Noir into the void, Dave lifted his eyes to her, and the relief in his expression turned to pain as his eyes glanced in the direction Noir had fled. I'm sorry. She turned, tears in her eyes, and flickered, disappearing in a flash of green light.
Dave couldn't breathe.
He could not breathe for a very, very long time.