Summary: A young Jade takes a nap and when she wakes up, there is a great commotion on Prospit. "He is awake!" some of them shout. "False alarm!" say others. With all this fuss, Jade was very curious as to who this "Heir" was. A brief one-shot about friends who will be made in the very near future.
Disclaimer: There are an infinite creative ways to say it, but Homestuck was not my brainchild and I lay no claim to the characters or locations that I have borrowed for the duration of this little fic.
Author's Note: I tried to write something for someone that wasn't a troll.
When Jade woke up, she was not in her room. Or, rather, it was not the room she remembered falling asleep in. The furniture was all different and none of her toys were spread out on the floor and none of the decorations were the same and, most obvious of all, everything was very garishly and undeniably painted in a most recognizable array of yellow and gold. Even her clothes, definitely not the ones she had gone to sleep in, were different. She looked more like she was dressed for a ball than for sleeping! And it was all so real, the weight of the fabric and the crinkled warmth of her bed and even the soft rasp of her own breathing as her head was pressed against the pillow. It was like she was in a whole new world.
None of this, of course, was any surprise to her. Jade had been waking up here for…well, she didn't really know how long, but it'd definitely been a long time. Once she'd worked up the courage to leave her room, she'd realized what a wonderful place Prospit was! She almost liked it as much as she liked living in the waking world! Of course, here she didn't have Bec or her garden, but she had a whole bunch of friends to talk to!
Speaking of friends…Jade could hear some kind of commotion outside, the strange little "voices" of her friends raised in what might have been song. Not weighed down by any of the sluggish drowsiness she would encounter when she woke up on Earth, she slid out of bed and went to her window, leaning as far out as she could without tumbling down.
The Prospitians were gathered in the streets, far more than she had ever seen before. They were gathering, it looked like, in the big square that was in between Jade's tower and the other tower that rose opposite her. Actually…were they…gathering around the tower itself? Jade squinted, but couldn't tell. And they were too far away for her to call for answers and expect to actually be heard.
"Hup!" With a practiced flourish Jade hopped over the windowsill and dropped a scant foot before catching herself, and, without thought to how or why, began to float. She just floated down for now; she would have lots of time to fly around later, when she was done figuring out what was up. She didn't float all the way down to the ground, just close enough to have a polite conversation. She rather liked being up in the sky, and spent as much time off the ground as she could.
"Hello!" she called out hesitantly, and when almost twenty of her white, oddly shaped friends turned to talk to her, she quickly began to wave her hands. "Oh, not all of you, I only need to ask a question!" They cleared a space for her and she drifted down the rest of the way, landing as gracefully as an eight-year-old on a dream planet could really expect to.
Once she was out of immediate sight, all the Prospitians began to move again, and this time she knew for sure they were probably headed for the tower…or rather, some of them were. Just as many people were heading away from the tower as towards it, and it was from those people she decided to get her answers. She tugged the sleeve of the nearest one as he passed, clearing her throat for further attention-grabbing purposes. He/she/it stopped, and it may have been her imagination how tense he/she/it seemed to move.
"Excuse me," she began. She was past the point now where the strange eyes and featureless faces bugged her, but it made it a bit harder to gauge the mood of who she was talking to. "Um…where are you all going? Has something happened?"
She may not have been able to see his/her/its features, but Jade would have had to have been blind not to see the clenched, shaking fists and impatient steps.
"A false alarm!" it announced strongly, and gave one firm stamp of its foot. "A false alarm is what's happening! Can you believe it? All this fuss and hubbub…and look, I even put on my best tie!" She (for Jade had decided in that moment that she was a girl) reached up and tugged at the aforementioned object, which was really quite lovely.
"It is a gorgeous tie," Jade admired, and got back to the subject at hand. "But…false alarm about what?"
"The boy!" At Jade's expression, the Prospitian drew herself up slightly. "You…don't know about the boy?"
"I…have no clue what you're talking about at all." But Jade was intrigued. Whoever this boy was, he must be pretty special for so many of them to have showed up, and especially so if this lady was so upset at whatever this "false alarm" business was. Jade decided, as soon as she was done with this, to find this boy to see what all the fuss was about.
"The Heir!" The lady pointed at the other tower, and Jade's stomach tightened a little bit. "Some ninny said the Heir had awoken, and we got all excited, and I got all dressed up and it was all because he saw the Postman! How ridiculous is that!"
Jade endured the ranting of the woman for several more minutes, admitting that yes, it was a very stupid error, yes, it was the most beautiful tie she'd ever seen, and no, she didn't want a matching one. Thank you very much for offering. When she got away, Jade turned and stared at the tower, now very very curious.
That tower was one of the first things she'd noticed when she'd come here, but it was also one of the places she hadn't visited yet. Not that she didn't want to, of course, and Jade loved exploring more than anything else (except maybe her little garden), but it had always felt…wrong to go to the tower. Like she was going to be intruding on some big secret or violating some very personal rule. But whoever this boy in the tower was, he must have been pretty important. And how many people could there possibly be, she thought, who would live in a tower just like hers?
Do they come here when they sleep too?
The thought excited her and pushed away some of her doubts. With a grin she lifted herself into the air and flew towards the tower.
Her initial elation at the idea of a companion and the thrill of seeing a new place quickly evaporated as she got closer to the tower. This felt very wrong. She felt like she was intruding on someone's privacy. She slowed as she drew nearer, but she didn't stop.
Jade swallowed and drifted closer and as she did saw a window just like hers and inside, a room that was also a lot like hers. There were some differences, namely in that apparently the bed was in a slightly different place. Feeling more and more sneaky every second, Jade drifted slightly to the side and the foot of a bed came into view. And then an actual foot. And then a leg. And then…
"Oh."
Jade almost dropped out of the sky right there. Lying on the bed which almost matched hers, in an outfit not unlike the one she was wearing, was a boy. A human boy. A boy like her. He even looked a bit like her, too!
Excitement effectively killed Jade's bad feelings and she flew in closer. He looked about her age…and about her height! He looked a bit like her, actually, at least from over here! He was curled up, and he looked like he wasn't sleeping as peacefully as she liked to think she did. Wow! She didn't get too close, because he was sleeping and she didn't want to disturb him, but immediately she began to get very excited. She began to bounce in the air, putting things together in her head.
The Prospitians were upset he hadn't woken up yet…which meant he would wake up! And Jade would have another friend! Not that she didn't adore her pale friends, but how exciting would it be to have another person to explore with! They would be the best of friends, she could already tell! And then they could look at the clouds together and fly around together and come up with cool flying tricks together and even have races around the moon!
Jade was so excited she could barely contain it! She let out a little squeal of delight and tumbled through the air, letting out all her excitement at once so she wouldn't wake up all fritzy and shot.
Jade hovered around the tower for quite a while before she drifted around the rest of the moon, and eventually turned her gaze up to the clouds. In them, she saw the boy again, but he wasn't on Prospit. He was in a room, all by himself, shouting at a little laptop with blue and red trim. And then she saw something else, something much more imminent but slightly less important. The visions, of course, prompted her to wake up, but it was the boy that she thought about as she went back to her golden bed.
"I wonder what his name is," she pondered as she laid her head down. Just before her eyes slid closed, one more cloud drifted across the sky and when she opened her eyes again, Jade decided it was John.