![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Dandelion Seed
[CW: mentions of graphic death, trauma, and The Homestuck Epilogues that don't actually exist.]
You'll get around to schooling eventually. Eventually. Realistically by twenty-one, you think, is a good estimate, because by then you'll have had lived three full years of the truest freedom, after sixteen with your destiny predescribed by games and great grandmothers, and two with the tether of sensationalized bloodsport tightly wound around your neck. But there needs to be some time in between. Fly full-tilt into the sun, and your wings are going to melt, or you'll get sunburn and the light will definitely blind you. It goes something like that, probably. Mostly. You could say such a virtue was exposited by Troll Percy Shelley, and people might believe you.
(Did the Trolls even have a Percy Shelley? Did they have a Mary Shelley? Instead of the impulse to find a hated rival to kiss sometimes and the need to sleep in piles of stuff when your stress gets unmanageable, you wish the Condesce had imparted some literary trivia on your once-brainwashed brain. Ah, well, maybe in another timeline. But anyway.)
The short of it is, you travel a lot these days. It's not that you don't like home; on the contrary, it's now the most second liveliest place you've ever lived. Your Dad Dad, the one scooped up by what you were promised was a brief stint in the Medium (but was probably longer, the Doctor did always seem keen on checking things out), quite likes it there, and he Dads pretty much everyone. Which is good, because you all need a Dad, even Dad - no, not Dad Dad, Xander Dad. Xandad, if you will. He's home pretty often too, except on those rare occasions he checks up on Nohr in disguise, because he's supposed to be dead, but he's worried and you get it, and also, you'd like to see Nohr more anyway? You got the crest tattooed on your arm underneath the Life symbol that blooms into a poppy on your left shoulder, and you absolutely don't want to be unworthy of it. But - but you really do love your home. It's beautiful. You have so many giant fucking birds that you can ride in loads of different colors. They're so warm and comfy to nap with. You have a bedroom full of pictures of all the people you've met, kitschy souvenirs from all the places you've gone, and anything a clever young lady on the brink of her adulthood could possibly want. It's a good place, a safe place. Roxy visits a lot, thank goodness, and you're always trying to stick around in case your bffsie drops by, but the wind is a temptress, and you just end up wandering, is all.
Honestly, it's a little odd to think about. Jane Crocker, a vagabond? No, you must have the wrong girl, this one is always better suited to be close at hand, taking care of things. But there's so much more than the view outside your window could ever show you, no matter where that window looked out upon, and there's no one who expects you to fit into the box that is the Maid of Life or the Heiress. There are no fancy titles or legacies to live up to. There's just you, and the endless expanse of possibility.
Sometimes it's a little scary. You know what they say about too many choices. Even so, it's what you need in your life, and you take full advantage of it.
You go to Nohr even when the others aren't visiting, spending weeks at a time learning dagger tricks from butlers and maids. You collect knives. It's kind of frightening, but also, you want one for all the kids at home who were stuck playing that dreadful game, even if you didn't know them. (All, that is, except for Calliope's brother. He doesn't get a knife, and you don't want to remember him.) Right now you've got about seven in your sylladex and the eighth - the one for you, Mom's knife, the one that spilled blood and never seems clean enough - is strapped to your leg underneath your clothes, not because it's convenient but because you don't feel comfortable without it, and nobody asks questions about it in Nohr. You meet a lot of teens there - children of Dad's sister's compatriots, you learn embarrassingly, after one teaches you the song he barely remembers. You kind of want to kiss most of them, but think better of it. Heaven forbid you bring the crown prince of Hoshido home for dinner.
(Can you segway for a moment about those knives? Because you love them. Jade's is white bone with a wolf's head carved at the bottom of the hilt with glimmering emeralds set in the eyes, and Jake's is gunmetal black and can take down dragons, and Dirk's is actually a silver shuriken you got engraved when you dropped by the Space Mall, the words "the stairs" looking back at you in shitty Comic Sans; Roxy's is a pocketknife with a pearly pink shell that can also open bottles, Rose's has some arcane runes etched in the hilt that you can't make use of but it's safe, Leo assures you when you ask him, it's not going to curse you; Dave's is surprisingly easy to keep sharp, and you use it to cut and peel apples. John's is your sylladex's main weapon, and it's not fancy, it just has some blue cloth bound around the grip, but it feels good to hold. The Trolls are ones you're hesitant to pick things out for, since you didn't even know them in passing too well, and one for Calliope hasn't sprung out for you yet. Give it time, though.)
But you don't stay there too long, you're always on the move. There's a month in the summer where you think you're on an Earth you know, but are relieved to learn things are different enough to not be the same, and you linger in a beach town on the east coast and become fast friends with the boy who lives on a house by the sea with his three alien surrogate moms. Nothing really catastrophic happens, but apparently they do on the regular? At least Gems aren't aware of InterGal7, it's nice to meet aliens who don't know who you are. You teach them how to bake many types of pies, quickly picking up on how each of them learns, and write down the actual recipes for their ward, who looks at the bundle of papers with starry eyes and wishes you safe travels when you finally pick up and head out.
There's times, on and off, where you take advantage of Elaine's invitation and find yourself kind of giddy over seeing Real Life Pokemon. They're a little stranger than you imagined them to be, when you were young and playing the Gameboys because that's what all the children were into, but you befriended an Audino to the point where you've got her in a Friend Ball in your sylladex and take her out to play and explore just as much as Lil' Sebastian pops out to get into trouble. The pair have become fast friends, it's sort of adorable.
There's a day in autumn where you find yourself in a valley of rolling green hills. You take tea with some sort of troll woman on the outdoor patio of her tall blue house and she gives you some comforting advice, and lets you take home a jar of the best strawberry jam you've ever eaten. As you leave, you hear a harmonica in the distance, and your heart aches as it wonders if you'll ever find your way back to the happy valley. It might not be so easily found next time. Oh, you think, but you'll always remember it.
You end up in Portland regularly, because you would never miss a session of Bolton's campaign, the one he made just for the rag-tag Champions who come to call, and you want to see Jamie and you want to check on Max and these three ridiculous men altogether ought to have as many people looking out for them as possible. Your halfling rogue is a beast and no one is surprised. And of course you visit everyone, or at least as many people as can be visited - finite space and wandering thoughts keep the full breadth of your shenanigans list woefully incomplete. You drop in on Ardyn and his Glaivefam, you check on Penny (poor, sweet, precious Penny, who keeps apologizing to her, who really didn't do anything wrong other than make a mistake, Penny we are FRIENDS, Penny! How many times have you reassured her now?), you eventually show your face back in Noctis and Luna's cat cafe after that one visit where you quite nearly screamed bloody murder upon accidentally showing up when Guy Fieri had come to film an episode of Diners, Drive Ins, and Dives. There are nights spent with the Doctor in that blue box of his, or hers, and an infamous adventure with Dr. Song in ancient Egypt that at least answered the question of how the nose of the Sphinx came down. (It wasn't actually terribly satisfying. Kind of a snore, really. At least you got to pie Napoleon in the face for being a douche.) For the people you can't visit, you send letters, even if you didn't know the person very well, because you'd like to think people might want an update on how everyone is doing, and if they don't, then they're not obligated to respond. It's something to do to fill the time, writing and taking pictures. It keeps a lot of the nightmares at bay.
But there are still many nightmares. No matter where you sleep, there are nights filled with blood and gore and bodies gone cold. Kurumi's missing her gloves and Ricky is sticky with lemonade and maple syrup and Chitanda is all bled out on the floor. Robots in pilgrim clothing keep piling Thomasin with rocks. Touko and Syo are together and silent and crying in front of the corpse of Byakuya Togami, solidarity in their grief. Natsuhi's head is gone. Junpei's neck snaps in the middle of him lecturing her that she doesn't know everything, stop acting like she does. Her mind cobbles together what it must have looked like for Lightning to die in space, and Roxy gets much worse than a shovel to the head by an unseen force. Jamie's throat is slit in front of her while someone's spinning a music box tinkling of Aloha-Oe in the background like some kind of perverted, twisted joke.
And then there are people who didn't die (at least, not for good) that die in your dreams. Xander is run through again, blood staining his sister's sword red. Yurika starts coughing up blood, like that scene in that Japanese movie Jake had tried to get you all to watch when you were fifteen and streaming movies together was new but Jesus Christ, Jake, they're all murdering each other on that island, can't we watch something nicer? But then electricity is being pumped through Nari to the point where even her body can't handle any more, or Church is a pincushion of Royal Arms, or the worst ones of all, where it's every single person who got caught up in that awful web of a "show" that's dead on the floor, and you're the one who did it. You've got your trident back and you're laughing, coated with blood, and you know what we don't linger on these, they're very bad. Very, very bad. The others might drive you to go seek out a person to be in the company of, but that one makes you beeline for the chocobos, and you keep getting in trouble for sleeping in their little barn thing with them, even though the warmth and feathers are usually able to calm you down quick enough.
Some of these dreams have been with you since this all started. You hate them, but you know they won't leave if you snap your fingers. It's going to take a lot of time and talk and healing for you to stop jolting awake at night in a cold sweat, throat tight with swallowed screams, and the shower doesn't run hot enough to make you feel like you're not covered in gore.
Hence, why you travel. Why you write letters. Why you take pictures and make friends and, collect knives and, yes, shockingly enough, sometimes flirt awkwardly with cute people. (You're getting better at it, when you see Caeldori you both pretend you're practicing flirting with each other but it's gotten very sappy and gently sapphic at the same time, and it's. Quite nice.) This is less a "happy ending", because those aren't really a thing, but more a "positive continuation". You're doing your best, and that's what matters - the chance and the choice for everyone to do their best.
But there have been some recent dreams that make you ache down to your bones, and they are dreams of home.
Not the home you're always happy to return to. The home you left behind. The one where you were always stuck.
Even if it was just you who'd been taken, you'd feel guilty for abandoning it, even if there was nothing to go back to. It's not right or fair, you find yourself thinking, that a whole bundle of children were put through such misery and only you get to live outside of it this way. (Not that Roxy doesn't tell you about Earth C, but. It's not your Earth or your life to live, there.) And these dreams always make you cry.
There's dreams about your teen Poppop. He's alone. He's sad. He pretends he's not, because things are supposed to be perfect, but he is, and you can't reach out to him to help, or reassure him, or even get to know him. There's dreams about your daughter, your Jade, sweet Jade, where her wanderings make you bittersweetly think of your own and say, ah, it's not just Jake she gets it from. And Jake - good Lord, those are bad dreams. Either they bury him in unspeakable unkindness or you actually get to patch things up with him properly, and somehow that hurts just as much. Roxy you don't dream of - or maybe you do, and the Void covers it all up, and that'd be a blessing, perhaps. You don't want to worry your bffsie about dreams like that.
But the dreams about Dirk are weird. Not because of Dirk's own brand of...Dirk-ness, but because he seems completely different every time.
Maybe it's to do with his insistence of his "splintered selves". Maybe your imagination has finally blossomed into something that churns out the impossible on the regular. (With all that's happened, it's possible.) But one night he's holding his own severed head in his hands and it's talking like there's nothing wrong, and you're screaming. Another night he's bruised and bloody and apologizing for not "beating Caliborn" and he won't clarify who he's talking about. Another night he's older than you, staring at your colored hair, your tattoos, shaking his head, muttering something about meat and candy and relevance and metatextual integrity and the "ultimate self".
You don't like that one very much. There's something about him that isn't right. But he's the first one you properly talk back to, even if it is a dream.
"What does that even mean, Dirk? 'Ultimate self' - you keep saying that, but you don't explain it."
On Dirk, his slight change in pallor and his aborted half-shuffle of a step back is just as strong as a recoiling flinch. "What the fuck," he says, and then tilts his head upward. "What the actual fuck."
"That's not an answer."
"...I mean, it's not a question you can ask, either."
Is he serious. "I literally just asked it, though. What do you mean by 'ultimate self'? See, I asked it again!"
"Why do you care?"
"Well, have you ever known me not to be curious about something? Even if this is a dream, I'm going to ask."
There's the slightest tilt of an almost smirk to his face. "Ah. Right. Yes, you're right, Jane. This is a dream. It's not real. It doesn't matter, then, so you shouldn't trouble yourself with asking."
It's. It's the way he says it that rubs you all sorts of irritated, like you're a small child whose stumbled upon a book with a complicated theme and details about real life atrocities, and your parent doesn't want to actually explain what they mean to you in a constructive manner. You feel your face redden and your cheeks puff in indignation, and you say as his mouth opens, "Alright, well, if you're going to be pedantic, then it's not a dream. It's some kind of...oh, I don't know, ridiculous Heart power message across universes or something."
He's quiet for a moment. "The fuck. Stop playing this game with me. I'm the player here."
"Now you're just avoiding the entire thing - Dirk, won't you answer my question? You're my friend, aren't you?"
"I don't know. Are you the Jane who is my friend?"
This is getting ridiculous and going nowhere. You're fairly certain it's definitely a dream, though won't admit as much, when you find yourself throwing things at him. Things that didn't exist there until a moment ago. Mostly Olive Garden breadsticks.
You don't get an answer out of him, but while the dream leaves you disoriented upon waking, it did feel good to pummel your friend with somehow addicting baked goods. And you do tell Roxy about that dream, the both of you giggling like idiots at the end.
Maybe you'll see Dirk for real and be able to ask him about it. Maybe you really could reconcile with Jake one day, and see John, and show Jade some of the places you've been. Nothing's really certain, but the chance is there. The belief that things can become better is there, even if you end up stumbling and falling. You can become anything you want to be - after all, you took your real self back, in the end. There's some dings and cracks and smudges, but nothing some time and care can't fix.
After all, isn't that what Life is about?
You'll get around to schooling eventually. Eventually. Realistically by twenty-one, you think, is a good estimate, because by then you'll have had lived three full years of the truest freedom, after sixteen with your destiny predescribed by games and great grandmothers, and two with the tether of sensationalized bloodsport tightly wound around your neck. But there needs to be some time in between. Fly full-tilt into the sun, and your wings are going to melt, or you'll get sunburn and the light will definitely blind you. It goes something like that, probably. Mostly. You could say such a virtue was exposited by Troll Percy Shelley, and people might believe you.
(Did the Trolls even have a Percy Shelley? Did they have a Mary Shelley? Instead of the impulse to find a hated rival to kiss sometimes and the need to sleep in piles of stuff when your stress gets unmanageable, you wish the Condesce had imparted some literary trivia on your once-brainwashed brain. Ah, well, maybe in another timeline. But anyway.)
The short of it is, you travel a lot these days. It's not that you don't like home; on the contrary, it's now the most second liveliest place you've ever lived. Your Dad Dad, the one scooped up by what you were promised was a brief stint in the Medium (but was probably longer, the Doctor did always seem keen on checking things out), quite likes it there, and he Dads pretty much everyone. Which is good, because you all need a Dad, even Dad - no, not Dad Dad, Xander Dad. Xandad, if you will. He's home pretty often too, except on those rare occasions he checks up on Nohr in disguise, because he's supposed to be dead, but he's worried and you get it, and also, you'd like to see Nohr more anyway? You got the crest tattooed on your arm underneath the Life symbol that blooms into a poppy on your left shoulder, and you absolutely don't want to be unworthy of it. But - but you really do love your home. It's beautiful. You have so many giant fucking birds that you can ride in loads of different colors. They're so warm and comfy to nap with. You have a bedroom full of pictures of all the people you've met, kitschy souvenirs from all the places you've gone, and anything a clever young lady on the brink of her adulthood could possibly want. It's a good place, a safe place. Roxy visits a lot, thank goodness, and you're always trying to stick around in case your bffsie drops by, but the wind is a temptress, and you just end up wandering, is all.
Honestly, it's a little odd to think about. Jane Crocker, a vagabond? No, you must have the wrong girl, this one is always better suited to be close at hand, taking care of things. But there's so much more than the view outside your window could ever show you, no matter where that window looked out upon, and there's no one who expects you to fit into the box that is the Maid of Life or the Heiress. There are no fancy titles or legacies to live up to. There's just you, and the endless expanse of possibility.
Sometimes it's a little scary. You know what they say about too many choices. Even so, it's what you need in your life, and you take full advantage of it.
You go to Nohr even when the others aren't visiting, spending weeks at a time learning dagger tricks from butlers and maids. You collect knives. It's kind of frightening, but also, you want one for all the kids at home who were stuck playing that dreadful game, even if you didn't know them. (All, that is, except for Calliope's brother. He doesn't get a knife, and you don't want to remember him.) Right now you've got about seven in your sylladex and the eighth - the one for you, Mom's knife, the one that spilled blood and never seems clean enough - is strapped to your leg underneath your clothes, not because it's convenient but because you don't feel comfortable without it, and nobody asks questions about it in Nohr. You meet a lot of teens there - children of Dad's sister's compatriots, you learn embarrassingly, after one teaches you the song he barely remembers. You kind of want to kiss most of them, but think better of it. Heaven forbid you bring the crown prince of Hoshido home for dinner.
(Can you segway for a moment about those knives? Because you love them. Jade's is white bone with a wolf's head carved at the bottom of the hilt with glimmering emeralds set in the eyes, and Jake's is gunmetal black and can take down dragons, and Dirk's is actually a silver shuriken you got engraved when you dropped by the Space Mall, the words "the stairs" looking back at you in shitty Comic Sans; Roxy's is a pocketknife with a pearly pink shell that can also open bottles, Rose's has some arcane runes etched in the hilt that you can't make use of but it's safe, Leo assures you when you ask him, it's not going to curse you; Dave's is surprisingly easy to keep sharp, and you use it to cut and peel apples. John's is your sylladex's main weapon, and it's not fancy, it just has some blue cloth bound around the grip, but it feels good to hold. The Trolls are ones you're hesitant to pick things out for, since you didn't even know them in passing too well, and one for Calliope hasn't sprung out for you yet. Give it time, though.)
But you don't stay there too long, you're always on the move. There's a month in the summer where you think you're on an Earth you know, but are relieved to learn things are different enough to not be the same, and you linger in a beach town on the east coast and become fast friends with the boy who lives on a house by the sea with his three alien surrogate moms. Nothing really catastrophic happens, but apparently they do on the regular? At least Gems aren't aware of InterGal7, it's nice to meet aliens who don't know who you are. You teach them how to bake many types of pies, quickly picking up on how each of them learns, and write down the actual recipes for their ward, who looks at the bundle of papers with starry eyes and wishes you safe travels when you finally pick up and head out.
There's times, on and off, where you take advantage of Elaine's invitation and find yourself kind of giddy over seeing Real Life Pokemon. They're a little stranger than you imagined them to be, when you were young and playing the Gameboys because that's what all the children were into, but you befriended an Audino to the point where you've got her in a Friend Ball in your sylladex and take her out to play and explore just as much as Lil' Sebastian pops out to get into trouble. The pair have become fast friends, it's sort of adorable.
There's a day in autumn where you find yourself in a valley of rolling green hills. You take tea with some sort of troll woman on the outdoor patio of her tall blue house and she gives you some comforting advice, and lets you take home a jar of the best strawberry jam you've ever eaten. As you leave, you hear a harmonica in the distance, and your heart aches as it wonders if you'll ever find your way back to the happy valley. It might not be so easily found next time. Oh, you think, but you'll always remember it.
You end up in Portland regularly, because you would never miss a session of Bolton's campaign, the one he made just for the rag-tag Champions who come to call, and you want to see Jamie and you want to check on Max and these three ridiculous men altogether ought to have as many people looking out for them as possible. Your halfling rogue is a beast and no one is surprised. And of course you visit everyone, or at least as many people as can be visited - finite space and wandering thoughts keep the full breadth of your shenanigans list woefully incomplete. You drop in on Ardyn and his Glaivefam, you check on Penny (poor, sweet, precious Penny, who keeps apologizing to her, who really didn't do anything wrong other than make a mistake, Penny we are FRIENDS, Penny! How many times have you reassured her now?), you eventually show your face back in Noctis and Luna's cat cafe after that one visit where you quite nearly screamed bloody murder upon accidentally showing up when Guy Fieri had come to film an episode of Diners, Drive Ins, and Dives. There are nights spent with the Doctor in that blue box of his, or hers, and an infamous adventure with Dr. Song in ancient Egypt that at least answered the question of how the nose of the Sphinx came down. (It wasn't actually terribly satisfying. Kind of a snore, really. At least you got to pie Napoleon in the face for being a douche.) For the people you can't visit, you send letters, even if you didn't know the person very well, because you'd like to think people might want an update on how everyone is doing, and if they don't, then they're not obligated to respond. It's something to do to fill the time, writing and taking pictures. It keeps a lot of the nightmares at bay.
But there are still many nightmares. No matter where you sleep, there are nights filled with blood and gore and bodies gone cold. Kurumi's missing her gloves and Ricky is sticky with lemonade and maple syrup and Chitanda is all bled out on the floor. Robots in pilgrim clothing keep piling Thomasin with rocks. Touko and Syo are together and silent and crying in front of the corpse of Byakuya Togami, solidarity in their grief. Natsuhi's head is gone. Junpei's neck snaps in the middle of him lecturing her that she doesn't know everything, stop acting like she does. Her mind cobbles together what it must have looked like for Lightning to die in space, and Roxy gets much worse than a shovel to the head by an unseen force. Jamie's throat is slit in front of her while someone's spinning a music box tinkling of Aloha-Oe in the background like some kind of perverted, twisted joke.
And then there are people who didn't die (at least, not for good) that die in your dreams. Xander is run through again, blood staining his sister's sword red. Yurika starts coughing up blood, like that scene in that Japanese movie Jake had tried to get you all to watch when you were fifteen and streaming movies together was new but Jesus Christ, Jake, they're all murdering each other on that island, can't we watch something nicer? But then electricity is being pumped through Nari to the point where even her body can't handle any more, or Church is a pincushion of Royal Arms, or the worst ones of all, where it's every single person who got caught up in that awful web of a "show" that's dead on the floor, and you're the one who did it. You've got your trident back and you're laughing, coated with blood, and you know what we don't linger on these, they're very bad. Very, very bad. The others might drive you to go seek out a person to be in the company of, but that one makes you beeline for the chocobos, and you keep getting in trouble for sleeping in their little barn thing with them, even though the warmth and feathers are usually able to calm you down quick enough.
Some of these dreams have been with you since this all started. You hate them, but you know they won't leave if you snap your fingers. It's going to take a lot of time and talk and healing for you to stop jolting awake at night in a cold sweat, throat tight with swallowed screams, and the shower doesn't run hot enough to make you feel like you're not covered in gore.
Hence, why you travel. Why you write letters. Why you take pictures and make friends and, collect knives and, yes, shockingly enough, sometimes flirt awkwardly with cute people. (You're getting better at it, when you see Caeldori you both pretend you're practicing flirting with each other but it's gotten very sappy and gently sapphic at the same time, and it's. Quite nice.) This is less a "happy ending", because those aren't really a thing, but more a "positive continuation". You're doing your best, and that's what matters - the chance and the choice for everyone to do their best.
But there have been some recent dreams that make you ache down to your bones, and they are dreams of home.
Not the home you're always happy to return to. The home you left behind. The one where you were always stuck.
Even if it was just you who'd been taken, you'd feel guilty for abandoning it, even if there was nothing to go back to. It's not right or fair, you find yourself thinking, that a whole bundle of children were put through such misery and only you get to live outside of it this way. (Not that Roxy doesn't tell you about Earth C, but. It's not your Earth or your life to live, there.) And these dreams always make you cry.
There's dreams about your teen Poppop. He's alone. He's sad. He pretends he's not, because things are supposed to be perfect, but he is, and you can't reach out to him to help, or reassure him, or even get to know him. There's dreams about your daughter, your Jade, sweet Jade, where her wanderings make you bittersweetly think of your own and say, ah, it's not just Jake she gets it from. And Jake - good Lord, those are bad dreams. Either they bury him in unspeakable unkindness or you actually get to patch things up with him properly, and somehow that hurts just as much. Roxy you don't dream of - or maybe you do, and the Void covers it all up, and that'd be a blessing, perhaps. You don't want to worry your bffsie about dreams like that.
But the dreams about Dirk are weird. Not because of Dirk's own brand of...Dirk-ness, but because he seems completely different every time.
Maybe it's to do with his insistence of his "splintered selves". Maybe your imagination has finally blossomed into something that churns out the impossible on the regular. (With all that's happened, it's possible.) But one night he's holding his own severed head in his hands and it's talking like there's nothing wrong, and you're screaming. Another night he's bruised and bloody and apologizing for not "beating Caliborn" and he won't clarify who he's talking about. Another night he's older than you, staring at your colored hair, your tattoos, shaking his head, muttering something about meat and candy and relevance and metatextual integrity and the "ultimate self".
You don't like that one very much. There's something about him that isn't right. But he's the first one you properly talk back to, even if it is a dream.
"What does that even mean, Dirk? 'Ultimate self' - you keep saying that, but you don't explain it."
On Dirk, his slight change in pallor and his aborted half-shuffle of a step back is just as strong as a recoiling flinch. "What the fuck," he says, and then tilts his head upward. "What the actual fuck."
"That's not an answer."
"...I mean, it's not a question you can ask, either."
Is he serious. "I literally just asked it, though. What do you mean by 'ultimate self'? See, I asked it again!"
"Why do you care?"
"Well, have you ever known me not to be curious about something? Even if this is a dream, I'm going to ask."
There's the slightest tilt of an almost smirk to his face. "Ah. Right. Yes, you're right, Jane. This is a dream. It's not real. It doesn't matter, then, so you shouldn't trouble yourself with asking."
It's. It's the way he says it that rubs you all sorts of irritated, like you're a small child whose stumbled upon a book with a complicated theme and details about real life atrocities, and your parent doesn't want to actually explain what they mean to you in a constructive manner. You feel your face redden and your cheeks puff in indignation, and you say as his mouth opens, "Alright, well, if you're going to be pedantic, then it's not a dream. It's some kind of...oh, I don't know, ridiculous Heart power message across universes or something."
He's quiet for a moment. "The fuck. Stop playing this game with me. I'm the player here."
"Now you're just avoiding the entire thing - Dirk, won't you answer my question? You're my friend, aren't you?"
"I don't know. Are you the Jane who is my friend?"
This is getting ridiculous and going nowhere. You're fairly certain it's definitely a dream, though won't admit as much, when you find yourself throwing things at him. Things that didn't exist there until a moment ago. Mostly Olive Garden breadsticks.
You don't get an answer out of him, but while the dream leaves you disoriented upon waking, it did feel good to pummel your friend with somehow addicting baked goods. And you do tell Roxy about that dream, the both of you giggling like idiots at the end.
Maybe you'll see Dirk for real and be able to ask him about it. Maybe you really could reconcile with Jake one day, and see John, and show Jade some of the places you've been. Nothing's really certain, but the chance is there. The belief that things can become better is there, even if you end up stumbling and falling. You can become anything you want to be - after all, you took your real self back, in the end. There's some dings and cracks and smudges, but nothing some time and care can't fix.
After all, isn't that what Life is about?