Hey guess what? Anyone still here? Here we are, in the year of 2019, and now that I am a full on senior in college, I cannot get this story out of my head even though I finished it literally six years ago. So ... I wrote the beginnings of a sequel. I can't promise that this will be long, or complete (though I will try, if people are interested to read it) but hopefully the writing will be better! I will make the sequel into a new fic if this writing bug keeps possessing me, but for now here is the first chapter, tacked right onto the end of this whole shebang. Did you think we were done? Did you think you'd finally found catharsis at the end of this fourteen year old's gore-filled epic of angst and bad narrative choices?
Like the ever-evolving cluster-fuck of Homestuck and its various narrative subsidiaries, this isn't ending yet.
If you are reading this, thank you sincerely for being a part of this story, which was and is so important to my journey as a writer and as a teenager growing into an adult!
This is the first chapter of Shelter. We catch back up with the gang approximately five years after the end of Haven. Rose, Dave, Jade and John are sharing a curtain-filled apartment, going to college and trying to live the most normal lives they can while the threat of possibly re-introducing a fatal disease to the world population still hangs over their heads.
If you would like to read more, please let me know 3
John sat curled on the couch, textbook balanced on his knees, scanning through his notes in near-total darkness. He heard from behind him the latch of the door open, and Dave's voice echoing in the tiny hallway.
"Coming in."
There was a small metallic whine as the blackout curtain covering the door was pulled open, and then shut again. John glanced up to see Dave emerging through the second blackout curtain, which lay over the entrance of the hallway leading to the door, pulling his shades off his head.
"God, it's hot as fuck out there," he said.
He stood, blinking for a few moments before his eyes adjusted to the dim light of the living room, which was only brightened by a cluster of three dim candles flickering in the corner on top of an old chest.
"How was class?" Asked Jade, who was sitting in a large, stuffed armchair with her socked feet stretched out over the coffee table.
"Fine. Not that exciting."
"No dead things today?"
"Nah, unfortunately not. You guys turned on the TV today?"
Jade stretched her arms up behind her head and yawned, glasses perched on the end of her nose.
"Nope," she said. "We haven't been up for that long."
"Well, it's all over the news," Dave said, kicking off his shoes to join the pile of various sneakers clustered around the curtain, "they're considering lifting the state of emergency since the last infection was like, months ago now."
John looked up from his book, where he'd been diagramming the nucleoid of a hamster cell.
"Damn, seriously?"
"According to the news, yeah. Pretty crazy, right?"
John nodded and looked back towards the book. It felt strange, possibly being the cause of a state of emergency to be re-instated. Well, if it ever came to that. He looked down at his hands, nails painted black to hide the grey and the back of his hand covered with frequent layers of semi-permanent spray tan which only sort of gave him a resemblance of his old skin color. Not that too many would even recognize him now, with what Rose nicknamed his '10,000 years of trauma' gaze and the fact he was still so short.
"You working tonight?" Dave asked, flopping down on the couch next to John and threatening to crumple all of his bio notes.
"No, tomorrow," John replied, pulling the stack of papers out of the way and trying not to think about yet another night trying to keep his eyes half-closed against the burning fluorescents of 7-11 while talking to drunk people until four in the morning.
"What time is it?" Jade asked, "Shouldn't Rose have come back by now?"
"Mm, it's only sunset now," said Dave, "I think she was staying in the library to work on a paper or something. If you don't mind I wanna see if the news is saying anything different."
"Go ahead," John said, and Jade nodded in agreement. Dave grabbed the remote from between two couch cushions and turned it on. The TV, on the lowest possible brightness setting, flared on and John watched as the silhouette of a reporter behind a desk filled the view. He turned back to his bio notes, tracing over his earlier drawing and double checking that he hadn't mislabeled any of the parts.
Jade swung her feet off the coffee table and, picking up her cane that was adorned with dog-stickers from next to the chair, pushed herself to her feet.
"I'm gonna put some coffee on, you want any?"
John and Dave both gave sounds of agreement, and so Jade stepped into the kitchen to boil some water.
"It's probably bad to be this addicted to caffeine, but like, I feel like that's part of the college experience, y'know?"
"It's the only part I'm gonna get," John replied, grinning slightly. "No dorms, no frats, no real classes during the day even but thank God we get to guzzle all the coffee we want."
"Exactly. Well, you can still drink."
"Yeah," John said. "The college experience is kind of limited to beverages in this household."
There was a loud crack, coming from behind the third blackout curtain that blocked off the entrance to the balcony. John jumped, glancing around quickly. He looked over at Dave, who shrugged.
"Sounded like a firecracker to me," he said. "Maybe people are happy about the whole CDC thing."
"Yeah," John said, trying to get his heart to stop racing.
His hand, without realizing, had jumped to the pocketknife he kept tucked into the front pocket of his jeans.
"I can check, if you want," Dave said, glancing sideways at John's tensed arm.
"It's okay," John said. "It's nothing."
Dave turned back towards the TV, and John to his notes.
A few minutes later Jade re-appeared, carrying a full French press of coffee in her free hand and an empty cup looped around her finger.
"There's coffee," she said. "BYOC."
Dave reached up, grabbing the coffee pot from her and leaning it gently down on the table as Jade sat back down. John looked around before spotting an empty cup sitting up on the arm of the couch and pulled it towards him. There was only a thin rim of brown circling the bottom and it smelled alright, so he held it out for Dave to pour the coffee into.
"Did you really just grab that random ass dirty cup in order to not have to get up?" Dave asked, but still poured the coffee.
"I mean, what am I gonna do," John said, lifting the coffee to his face, "get sick?"
"Fair enough," Dave said, settling back down on the couch.
Just then they heard the door opening again, and the sound of faint yelling filled the room.
"It's dark," Rose said, "also you should come outside, it's pretty funny."
"What's going on?" John asked, as Rose came through the second curtain, shrugging off her backpack.
"They're celebrating," Rose said. "Fireworks and everything. It's like an impromptu block party."
She crossed the room and pulled back the curtain covering the glass doors of the balcony. Outside the stars were just beginning to prick in the sky, but John could see that there were some lights coming from down on the street. As Rose pushed open the sliding door the tiny apartment filled with noise, chattering and popping and whooping. John closed his textbook and stacked it on top of his notebook on the table and followed Rose out onto the balcony.
They overlooked a small alleyway, filled with more apartments on the other side, and it seemed like the whole complex was outside. In the alley, groups of people were lighting off small fireworks, someone was blaring music out of a boom box, and scattered across several balconies were groups of people clustered and watching the hubbub below. Jade came up next to John, leaning forward onto the rail and looking down. A few of the larger fireworks popped up to where their apartment lay, disputing sparks that lingered in John's vision even with his eyes closed. Rose lit a cigarette between her teeth and ran her fingers through her hair, exhaling gently.
"Hey neighbor!"
John glanced to the right of him, where, on just the next balcony over, a group of people stood chatting over bright, pop-y music. A girl with shoulder-length blonde hair and a huge smile waved at him over the several-foot gap between their balconies. John smiled and waved back, double checking out of habit that his skin was the right color, and wondering for a moment if he'd remembered to put his contacts in.
"You wanna drink?" The girl yelled, holding up a half-empty beer bottle in her own hand.
John laughed slightly.
"Sure," he said, nodding as the girl stepped towards the edge of the balcony and leaned down for a moment before coming up with another bottle.
"You better be a good catch, I don't want this to go to waste," she said before lobbing the icy bottle towards John's.
He reached up and caught it with one hand right before it crashed into his head, and the girl looked at him with wide eyes and started to laugh.
"Oh my God I'm so sorry," she said, "I tend to throw a little too aggressively when I'm drunk. And I tend to get a little too drunk when there's something this good to celebrate!"
She leaned her stomach forward over the balcony rail and held out her hand. Pink nail polish glittered on the ends of her fingers, and her face was slightly flushed.
"I'm Roxy," she said. "Sorry for trying to kill you with a beer bottle."
"John," John said, reaching forward as well until their fingertips brushed together slightly.
"I guess this is not a great distance for a handshake," she said, and then laughed, standing back up and downing the rest of her drink in one go.
"We're having a little thing over here," she said, gesturing the various people around her, milling in and out of the apartment. "Obviously, I guess. But feel free to come over if you want to have a conversation without shouting! It's just like, next door, the door's open and everything. You can bring your girlfriend too," she said, jerking her head behind John.
"What?"
John turned around to see Jade still leaning against the balcony railing and staring down at the fireworks in the street with a contented smile on her face. Either she wasn't hearing this yelled conversation or she was pretending not to, but John thought he saw a tiny smirk come over her face.
"She's my – like my sister," John shouted back to Roxy. "Not my girlfriend."
John reached down to pull open the beer bottle in his shirt, taking a long swig. He drank often enough, but that was only with Jade and Rose and Dave and the most exciting thing that usually happened was all of them making Dave go buy Doritos at 7-11 and then eating them on the balcony. Talking to girls seemed so far out of the question given that he was completely nocturnal and the height of an eighth grader, and the last girl he'd really even given a thought towards was, well. . . John shook his head quickly, ridding himself of the shadow images flickering in the back of his head. Roxy was there, leaning over the balcony with a smile on her face, a genuine smile of someone who has seen mostly good things in life, and John was not going to spend his remaining time dwelling on darkness.