If Not For Everything

“I wish none of this had ever happened!” you yell, releasing your pent up frustration rather unfairly toward your biological sister, only half-sober. There are tears in your eyes and you can’t remember the last time you cried. It frustrates you that you can’t hold this back anymore. You’re sure the others have probably heard you yelling at Rose, but except for Kanaya, who might come to defend her girlfriend if she suspected malicious intent, you’re pretty sure no one will bother you. After all, these are human troubles. Who else would care but the two of you?

“What – what happened?” Rose asks, and she looks genuinely curious, causing you to think that maybe she isn’t too drunk to remember the last three years. She’s asking what’s caused you to lose your control so completely and drop your coolkid attitude in favor of tears and resentment.

“Are you kidding me, Rose?!” you yell anyway. “All of this has happened. All of this is infuriating. Why the hell did it have to be the four of us? The sixteen of us, counting them,” you say, meaning the trolls. “Why couldn’t it have been some other stupid kids?”

“I dunno, Dave. That’s just howwit is, I guess,” Rose shrugs. “And now we gotta deal with it an’ stuff.”

“Well I can’t deal with it anymore,” you tell her shortly. You cross your arms firmly and look away, unable to look at her sway a bit on her feet. “Whatever,” you amend, quieter. “I’ll just…I’ll be in my room.”

Rose murmurs something as you leave, but you ignore it, already halfway down the hall. You hear a door behind you and Kanaya’s voice, and you guess that she’s consoling Rose. It doesn’t matter to you right now. She won’t remember this tomorrow.

Inside your room, you fall onto your bed with as much anger as you can. It’s not the bed’s fault, or Rose’s fault that you’re angry and hurt. You guess it’s John’s. But it’s yours, too.

A year and a month or two before you and your three best friends started playing the fucking stupidest game ever created, your bro John told you that he wanted to make sure you didn’t forget his birthday. He’d made you a crappy little application thing that would pop up on the desktop of your computer on April 13th with a Ghostbusters animation (that he definitely hadn’t made, his “programming skills” were practically nonexistent), reminding you that it was his birthday and you should probably say something. You hadn’t told him that you’d never forget his birthday; he was too excited about his application.

The problem was that you’d never disabled it. Even through the transformation your computer had underwent to become your shades, it retained its programs and downloads. So the day that this idiotic adventure started, it popped up the moment you turned on your computer. That was fine, whatever. The second year, your first on this meteor with the other chucklefucks, Rose had been borrowing your shades while you took an ironic nap, and she simply closed out of the pop-up when she saw it, knowing you’d remembered. The third, it popped up but you had your eyes closed – you’d spent that day fulfilling a dare from Karkat to be “blind” the whole day and see how well you could cope with no environment as opposed to a darkened one. But this year you weren’t able to avoid the unwelcome reminder.

The third year on this godforsaken meteor, feeling so close to the end of one trip and the beginning of the next, was frustrating. Despite the other six occupants of the meteor, it was so much lonelier than the last two. Maybe it was because this year, you didn’t have your sister to talk to, as she was too drunk and too into her girlfriend. You and Terezi hadn’t had a thing since you confronted her about Gamzee, and she was just as bad at Rose about seemingly not being coherent at any time. The Mayor couldn’t talk. Any chatter, mostly about Can Town, was nearly all one-sided and empty. Karkat was the only bro you had anymore, but he just didn’t…understand. He had problems of his own that I didn’t get, and it was the same in reverse. I got that. But it was lonely, still.

Before, if you were even half this upset, you would just talk to John. You don’t remember a single time that he didn’t answer when you were in some sort of distress, like he always knew when you needed him. Like when you got your ass kicked by Bro and you thought you might have broken your back. Or when you had mono in sixth grade and you were out of school for weeks. He’d always been there. And now he wasn’t, and fuck, that pissed you off.

Lying on your bed isn’t good enough for you anymore – something needs to hurt as much as you do. You instantly spot the metal box that’s been with you since you entered the medium. You had first figured it was one of the several pieces of overly-fake-looking sci-fi machinery Jade had deployed in your apartment, but the last time you went back to the room you’d lived in most of your life, you noticed something about the box that you hadn’t taken time to care about before: not only did the box have no buttons, switches, panels or, apparently, any way to open it at all, but the box had a slight…glow emanating from it. Magic wasn’t real, you reasoned. But at the time, you thought of Rose’s magicky crystal ball shit and thought, Maybe. So you took it with you.

It’s rather large, a cube about eight by eight by eight inches, but it wasn’t difficult to captchalogue it and forget about it until you started settling in with the trolls. But then there were other things to worry about – back when the meteor had more life, and everyone on it wasn’t so drunk or downhearted. So you’d dumped it in the corner.

Now it just reminds you of your situation – useless, unnecessarily complicated, dull and lifeless. It makes you think of yourself, cold and shut out and untouched. That pisses you off even more. The next thing you know, you’re kicking the stupid box as hard as you can. The force you put into your kick is much more than necessary: the box caves in almost completely on one side and you fall backwards. Your foot only hurts a little, not nearly as much as you expected, and your attack seems almost passive-aggressive, which releases no tension and only frustrates you further. But you give up. What the fuck, right? Tomorrow would be April 14th, and nothing would be wrong. Or, alternatively, you’d land in the next session, which was something to be excited about.

Why are you so upset, anyway? You’ll see him soon. So soon, it’s unreal. Seeing John, something that’s been so important to you almost since you first started talking to him, is so close. You should be excited, not frustrated.

You shake your head at yourself, feeling stupid. You’ve been overreacting all day. You’ll have to apologize to Rose tomorrow, and maybe to Kanaya for leaving her to take care of your sister.

You fall back down on your bed and you’re asleep within minutes. You wonder what your first witty words to John will be. You think you want to make him laugh. That’d be fitting, considering how little of it you’ve been doing yourself.

That thought brings you quickly back to your more morose thoughts. If we’d never have met, you think sullenly, we never would have played that stupid game. You roll over. I wish – I wish we were college kids. At a place in our lives where we were moving and living. I wish the trolls weren’t trolls, I mean – aliens? Really? I wish we’d never met…

You don’t see it, but just after your consciousness drifts away, the box’s glow intensifies. The caved-in side of the box tries to fix itself as it always does when it gets a bit broken. The metal’s extremely malleable, after all, and easy to damage. It needs a defense mechanism. But the injury caused to the box by an extremely angry Strider foot is giving the box some pause – there’s a crack. It doesn’t know how to fix that. Just dents. How can it mend itself? It only knows how to bend.

The box fixes what it can, and gives up. The crack stays, then. Something begins leaking out of the crack. If you were awake and saw the substance, you might freak out. It’s something weird, a liquid that shines and almost…sparkles. Like some kind of girly makeup. But it’s black, making it look like liquid sky, the same kind of sky you’ve looked at apathetically for years.

If you could see it, you wouldn’t have a good feeling about the box. And you shouldn’t. You know how wrong some of Rose’s experiments went, back in the day. But you don’t know that Rose borrowed the box to get rid of a particular experiment, a mix of magic and her alchemy, that she hoped one day to get back to. You don’t know that she was temporarily storing it somewhere she thought no one would find it. You don’t know that it’s dangerous.