A/n: Yeah, already. Building everything up a little more and explaining some things. And a bit of fluff at the end. Enjoy!
Disclaimer: I do not own Homestuck. Come on, you should know this by now.

For the next three days, you, Dave, and Jade do everything you can to find out what's going to happen to Rose, Kanaya ( as well as whatever's currently happening to Bro and Jake), how Lil' Cal connects to them being caught, and who Lord English is. Dave used some of the hacking skills Bro had taught him to search every database he could. Jade did some poking around with some of the professors at the school. But both came up blank. On the third day of searching you knew nothing more than you did initially.

The third day however you had a revelation of sorts. You remembered that your dad had told you once about when he was a boy, how not all information was kept in the electronic databases. Some of it was still kept in books. You'd read about books while you were still being schooled from home. They were an Artifact, something from the old world that the government kept close control on. There was a scale of the level of control the government had on Artifacts. The first level was a Passable. These were things that you could use daily and move freely with, like a pocket watch. Then there were Inheritances. This level of artifact had to remain within a home and could only be given to family members, like the harlequins your dad continuously tried to pass off to you. Then there were the Restricteds. These were kept by the schools to use for educational purposes. And then there were the Forbiddens. No one but high ranking government officials were ever allowed access to these, and from what you learned, for them to even get clearance was a long process. Some books ranged from Inheritances to Forbiddens, and you are absolutely sure that the information you want would be in a Forbidden book. And you know just where to find all of the Forbidden books that you'll need to help your friends.

You don't tell Dave or Jade what you're planning on doing. You spend your day as you normally would, waiting for the time you planned to pull off your operation. And you have to admit you feel like a badass, seeing as you're going to do something sneakier than Dave and his hacking, and because you're wearing all black just like the spies in your favorite spy movies.

When the clock tells you that it's 2:27 am is when you make your move. You know Dave went to sleep nearly an hour ago, and that by now he'd be sound asleep. It's one of the advantages to having lived with your best friend for a while. You slip quietly out the back door and into the garden, knowing that the front door would be too conspicuous. You move quietly over the ground to the back wall, where Jade had one day shown you the ivy she had planted that climbed the wall and was sturdy enough to climb. Grabbing the vines in your hands, you scale the wall, check to make sure you weren't seen, and jump onto the street below. You begin your trek to the building that houses the records, which is nearly half the city away. Sticking to the shadows, you go completely unnoticed the entire way there.

You've timed it just right that the sole guard who stood watch over the entrance of the old building that housed the Forbidden items had left to get coffee at a shop a few blocks down the road. None of the higher-ups ever knew this but you did, there had been a few rumors of it around the school, but no one would ever act on it. You however, use this opportunity to slip in, using the lock picking tricks you learned from one of your dad's Inheritance books. This was probably the one and only time Colonel Sassacre would ever come in handy. You enter into the building and are shocked. There are items of all shapes and sizes everywhere. There's no organization to any of the Forbiddens that you find as you enter the building. But you can't help to notice the lack of books, which gives you some hope that somewhere here they were in a room and organized.

Items threaten to tumble down upon you from precariously perched places as you weave your way deeper into the building. You look around for any sign of a room that could contain books but are not fruitful in your search. When you do finally find a door that's worth opening and step in, you find some very interesting things. First, you find four Strife Specibi modus storage units. These are add ons to the Fetch Modus that everyone uses for carrying what they need, and they're something only those who end up as designated soldiers are allowed to use. The four you find though are different, and all together strange however. They each bear a symbol on them, and as you look at them, you recognize the symbols. Why in the world would there be Strife Specibi with Dave, Rose, Jade, and even your symbols on them in a Forbidden storage. You stick them in your Modus because hell, it technically belongs to you anyway. That's how it worked, if you had a symbol, anything that had your symbol was rightfully yours to take. And you take the others' with you as well, because they belong to them. As you finish putting the last one, yours, you realize that it didn't store in your Modus like the others, but became an automatic function of your Modus. 'Maybe,' you think, 'this could come in use later.'

You continue through the building, your interest piqued because of the addition to your modus. You look around and find several more things that rightfully belong to your friends. You find a gun with Jades symbol, and it's pretty impressive to say the least. You find knitting needles with Rose's symbol. And you find a broken sword with Dave's symbol. You place all of them in your Fetch Modus to give to your friends later. The next room you go into catches your eye because it emits a blue light. You enter and find another item which has a familiar symbol on it. It's yours this time, and what you've found is a hammer, a large one, that reminded you of the pogo ride you used to have as a child in your yard. Excitedly, you attempt to add this to your Modus, but find that it becomes allocated to your newly obtained Strife Specibi. You feel a bit safer if the guard were to come in now. You could fight back, even if he did have a government regulated Gunkind.

You move through the rest of the building until finally, finally, you find what you were looking for. The room you happen upon is full of books. It's unorganized for the most part, except for the one wall of official looking books. You riffle through them until you find exactly what you're looking for, a small book titled Crimes Within the Nation, their Sentencing, and how they are Determined. You quickly put it into your Modus before you realize in the worst of ways, that it was not a good idea. You curse your inability to successfully use your damn Modus without sending something flying across the room. The item chucked was your school books, all of them. They explode across the room, flying everywhere, knocking over stacks upon stacks of the unorganized books. The sound is deafening to you and you know you have to get out now, before someone comes to investigate. You dash into the hallway and look for the closest escape. There's a window at the end of the hall, and you dash to it, throwing it open hastily and jumping out, remembering to turn and close it behind you before running as fast as you can away from the scene of your crime.

When you make it back to the apartment, taking in shuttering breaths from running so long, it's well past 3 am. But you could not care less about the time as you dashed up the stairs to Dave's room, opening the door and frantically shook him to wake him up. He wakes up with a startled grunt and allows you to pull him down the stairs and across the garden to throw pebbles at Jade's window until she comes out. Then, you tell them what you did, and show them what you found. You give them what's theirs, opting to give Dave Rose's things to take care of, seeing as he had the most control over his Modus. They equip their Strife Specibi and new weapons as you did before the three of you gathered around the book to find out exactly what was happening.

The whole situation looked grim. The price, you find in the book, for being convicted of homosexuality, is being sent to one of two camps, Prospit for those who "weren't supposed to end up homosexual" and Derse, for those who were "damned from the moment they Awakened". Normally, if you went to one camp, your partner went to the other. Which was dangerous. Because, if you and your partner had already formed a bond, well, it could mean death. You know this again because of schooling. You had learned of the four non-family bonds that could be foraged once you were given your gender. The first bond was the Matesprit, a bond that could only be formed once. Two people could only form this bond when two things were achieved. First, the other person had to be the person you were destined to form the bond with, and second, you had to seal it by...well, interpersonal relations. If Rose and Kanaya or Bro and Jake had formed these and were apart with the distance between Prospit and Derse, they would get sick and eventually, they could die. Which was not an option. The other 3 bonds, Moirail, Auspice, and Kismesis were a bit more vague, but they were not at the forefront of your mind in that moment.
You finished reading before the others, full of fear as you watched them finish reading the passage, trying to gauge their emotions. Jade was scared like you, you could tell, but that night you couldn't tell how Dave was feeling like you normally could. You took the book, looking through it for any mention of a Lord English, using it as an excuse not to meet Jade's green eyes, or Dave's through his shades. All you came up with was that he was currently in charge of the "correction facilities" of Prospit and Derse.

Finally, you became the one to break the silence, "We have to do something."

"But what?" Jade asked sadly, "We're only 17 and the government would never let us handle them or leave or visit them or anything!"

Dave shook his head, standing up, " I dunno about you two, but I'm going after them."

Both you and Jade looked at him stunned before he started talking again, "Like hell am I just going to sit here and not help them. I owe it to them to try to help all four of them, even if it means getting into trouble or any shit like that. They could lock me up in one of those camps after for all I care. But there is no way in hell that I'm letting my friends die because of who the fuck they love. I don't care if you two stay behind, but I'm doing this."

You suddenly feel very defiant to his statement, "Dave, their our friends too. I don't know about Jade but I'm not going to just sit here and wait for you to try and do it by yourself. I'm going with you and don't you dare say no or try and make me stay here. You're not the only one with a moral compass, jackass."

Jade smiles and nods, "I'm going too."

"It's settled then," Dave says, "Here's the plan, 'cause it's the best we've got to go on. In two days, they'll be shipping Kanaya and Rose off to Prospit and Derse. We've got to tail them and figure out how to get in. Then we'll do whatever the hell it takes to free them. To free anyone at those camps. From there, who the fuck even cares. Let's do this shit."

You all nod in agreement. You return to your respective apartments. When you've reached the safety of yours the reality of the whole situation finally falls on you. You're the last of the group to finally break down, to finally fall to the floor of your living room in tears because of how fucked up everything was. You had tried so hard to be the one who was strong for everyone. The friend-leader. But you couldn't keep it up. Because sometimes it was all too much. And when you finally did break down, Dave was there for you like you were for him. He held you until you stopped crying, until you had cried yourself to exhaustion, so much so that you fell asleep in his warm embrace. You wouldn't know until you asked when all was said and done, but that night, he carried you upstairs to his room, placing you gently on the bed. Hesitantly, he placed a kiss upon your forehead and held you all through the night, getting up before you so that you would never know.