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edenfallingI think it is time to admit that I am not going to finish this fic, because at the moment it has no plot and the minute it acquires one, it will turn into yet another novel-length WIP hanging over my head. (Particularly since I suspect the plot would involve A) twelve trolls and twelve humans learning to deal with their new supernatural powers, and B) somebody trying to disrupt the handover from the old Aspects to the new ones -- your standard YA fantasy, in other words.) But I am fond of these opening scenes with Dave and Aradia, so I am posting them for the record.
Dave and Aradia always knew there was something different about them, but being weird's not a problem if you're weird together. (3,750 words)
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Aspects of Immortality
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The world runs on twelves. Nobody knows why, not even the Aspects, but that's the pattern everything falls into. Except for humans, the full cycle breaks down into threes and fours, while trolls get twos and sixes. Nobody knows the reason for that either, but it's rock solid truth.
"So really, you should be a troll," Aradia tells Dave when they're both six years old and already so comfortable with the groove of their friendship that nothing can shake them out of it. "You and me makes two friends, you and your brother makes two people in your hive, you're six years old -- see?"
"Yeah? Well you should be human then, 'cause you and me and your horns makes three," Dave retorts. It's a lame response, but Aradia giggles and tosses her head to show off the awesome orange-yellow spirals of her horns, so it's like the lameness dove down through a layer of irony and turned out cool anyway. Or something like that. Dave's bro likes to talk about irony, but Dave's not sure he gets it yet. He doesn't get a lot of what his bro talks about.
"Come on, let's go down to the stream and work on our dam," Aradia says, grabbing Dave's hand and yanking him out of his thoughts. He lets her pull him through the park that straddles the boundary between the troll and human halves of Watersmeet. The stream isn't much of a stream, but their dam isn't much of a dam either -- all it really does is attract crows, who like to stand on it and puff themselves up like the feathery assholes they are.
Dave's bro says crows aren't actually death omens, but a lot of people still think they're bad luck. Aradia thinks they're cute. Dave doesn't. He throws stones at them until they flap off and do their stupid cawing thing from a distance.
Aradia gets tired of working on the dam and decides they should dig a hole and pretend they're archaeologists instead.
"What's an archaeologist?" Dave asks. He doesn't know where Aradia gets all her ideas, but she always comes up with crazy stuff and drags him along. He grumbles but he doesn't really mind -- even when her games are dumb, he likes it when she's happy.
"They dig up dead cities and mummies and stuff!" Aradia says excitedly. "And old books and jewelry and swords and--"
"Wait, mummies?" Dave interrupts. "Cool."
The hole is only one foot deep when he steps back, grabs a stick from the dam, and shouts, "Look out! The mummy's awake! It wants to suck out your heart and steal your life!"
Aradia blinks, then grins and takes off her belt. She stands at Dave's side, holding it by the buckle. "Don't worry, I'll protect you," she says. "No mummy gets to eat your blood-pusher while I'm here!" She waves the belt around like a whip.
"Psssh, other way around," Dave says, and the afternoon degenerates into flailing at each other with makeshift weapons and running around the tree-lined banks of the tiny stream until Dave's bro appears from nowhere and slings them both over his shoulders.
"Playtime's over, kiddos," he says. "Hold tight; we're heading home."
He flash-steps; the world breaks into a chain of time-lapse photographs as the city zooms past. Aradia wraps her legs around his arm, Dave sticks his hands under the strap that holds his bro's katana to his back, and they laugh at the expression on the grubminder's face when a human yanks open the group-hive's door and tosses Aradia over the threshold.
"See you next week, Dave!" Aradia says as she waves goodbye from the doorway. She's on tiptoes, practically dancing, her whole body behind the motion. Dave holds up his hand and twitches his wrist once to say 'yeah, same' without acting all uncool while Bro is watching. Aradia grins and giggles and disappears into the hive, slamming the door behind her.
It's kind of cool that she doesn't care about being cool.
"I wish Aradia went to my school," Dave says as he gets a piggyback ride home at more normal speed. (This is still totally cool because anything his bro does is automatically cool.) "Why don't humans and trolls go to the same schools?"
"Because people worry about stupid shit," his bro says. "When you're older, we'll get you into a mixed-species school. There's a couple in the city."
"Awesome," Dave says, and tips his head back to watch the huge, golden-red sun spear itself on the city skyline as it falls toward the western horizon. He likes the bright colors, and the way the sun has a pattern -- every day a little longer than the last as spring drags on toward summer -- that he can almost feel like a weight in his bones. He likes that every day ends so the next day will be new all over again.
"Shades, little man," his bro reminds him.
Dave makes a face but tugs his sunglasses back down from his forehead. The colors dim and turn kind of grayish-brown, the whole world a little dirtier and less interesting. Dave's not sure he likes wearing shades, but if his bro says he has to, he has to.
He stares straight at the sun all the way home.
Dave is eight years old before he realizes most people can't do that without going blind.
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Trolls and humans live together out of necessity rather than preference. There's only so much land area in the world, after all, and the last hundred thousand years of Marina's history has mostly been the story of two aggressive, intelligent species learning how to uneasily coexist. The Aspects help with that, a little -- they smack down any serious attempts at inter-species genocide -- but mostly the Aspects worry about the metaphysical gears of the world and let everyone else worry about the day-to-day stuff themselves.
In some countries, this means trolls rule and humans are second class citizens. In other countries, humans are on top. In Sonderland, there's an uneasy tension between the ideal that all people are created equal and the hardwired biological truth that in some ways trolls and humans are just not compatible. So everyone pays the same taxes and joins the same army, but integrated civilian housing is pretty rare, and what counts as murder among trolls isn't the same as among humans, or even between trolls and humans. And don't get Aradia started on the mess that passes for elections and Congress.
A mess was probably inevitable when troll colonies and human colonies joined forces to fight off their various parent countries, but that doesn't mean she has to like the way her schoolfeeders present it.
"Yeah, the story of history is like, people are dumb, dumb leads to fights, fights lead to war, war leads to famine and plague, everybody dies, nobody learns a fucking thing," Dave agrees. "Then they do it all over again."
"People are very, very dumb," Aradia sighs, curling up next to Dave while he plays some kind of car racing game. They spend most weekends at his apartment now instead of in the park. People are less willing to ignore trolls and humans roughhousing together when they're eleven than when they're six, and Aradia knows the wary looks bug Dave more than he'd ever admit.
Also, there are never any ghosts around his building. She doesn't mind hearing the dead -- most of them are just lonely, and they deserve to have someone pay a little attention! But it's nice to get a break now and then.
Aradia wriggles on the couch, pillowing her head more comfortably in Dave's lap. His legs are kind of thin and bony, but she likes to feel his body heat seep through the fabric of his jeans and the wiry mess of her hair, as if his blood is singing to her own. Humans can be weird about personal space, but even Dave and his brother are more open to skin contact than most trolls. "It's so frustrating, though!" she says, returning to her grievance. "History could be the most interesting class ever -- think of all the disasters and discoveries -- but I think my schoolfeeders are trying to make classes as boring as possible. Honestly, we're eleven years old. We can handle some excitement!"
"I know, right? We never get any of the cool details either," Dave says. He lifts one hand from the controller for a second and reaches down to shift Aradia's head a couple centimeters toward his knees. "Watch the horns, sis. I don't have any bone shield over my fragile meat parts."
"Humans are so badly designed," Aradia says, reaching up to poke the unprotected skin of Dave's stomach. He doesn't twitch, so she slides her hand under his shirt and tries again, angling to touch with her claws instead of the pads of her fingers. "Like tissue paper -- you crack open at a teeny tiny sneeze."
"Pfft. Get your terminology straight -- you crack, we tear. And tears are hella easier to fix," Dave says, still ignoring Aradia's effort at distraction. "Also, we can take as much heat as you can, but guess which species deals better with the cold? Oh wait, that would be humans. And don't even get me started on the gill-mutants," he adds before Aradia can bring up sea dwellers. "It doesn't count if you can't all breathe underwater. Any human can live anywhere any other human can, no matter what color skin and hair we have."
Aradia can't see his eyes through his shades, but she knows him well enough to tell that he's secretly laughing at her, all smug-pleased that he jumped on her objection before she could raise it herself.
Oh, it is on.
Aradia knocks the controller out of Dave's hands, pushes him against the back of the futon, and yanks his shirt up over his face, trapping his arms for a crucial two and a half seconds. She blows a giant raspberry over the birthdent in his stomach. Not even Dave can stay chill through that.
He makes a noise halfway between laughter and a shriek, claws his way out of his shirt, and rolls both of them right off the futon onto the musty carpet.
"Take it to the roof," Dave's bro says, appearing out of what might as well be thin air. Dave twitches under her.
"Yes sir, sorry sir, we're going sir," Aradia chirps, scrambling to her feet and grabbing her whip from the coat rack by the door. She dashes for the stairwell -- first to reach the roof has the obvious advantage of an extra second or three to adjust to direct sunlight, plus the chance to get a free strike while their opponent's dodging space is limited by the doorway. Dave snatches his sword from the umbrella stand and chases her, slamming the door behind himself.
Aradia would swear he doesn't pass her, but somehow when she reaches the roof, Dave's already there waiting by the far edge, his sword pointed down like she isn't a worthwhile threat.
He flash-stepped. He figured it out.
She poises her whip, ready to strike. "How does it work?" she demands. "We've been trying to copy you bro's flash-step since forever. When did you figure it out? Why didn't you tell me? You have to teach me!"
Dave shrugs. "I dunno if I'm doing what he does -- I mean, some days I swear Bro can fucking teleport -- but just going fast..." The corners of his mouth twitch down for a second in what would be a massive scowl on anyone but a Strider. "It's like, you know how you started hearing dead people last year? And we always know what time it is? Well, last week I started hearing this backbeat all the time, like the universe up and stuffed a metronome in my brain and hid the off button, and the thing is, I shit you not, everything moves to the beat. The whole universe is dancing like there's no tomorrow in a shitty rattrap backstreet club and the DJ never switches up the rhythm."
He pauses.
"And?" Aradia asks.
"So I step outside the beat," Dave says. He swings his sword up and rests the flat of the blade on his right shoulder. "I dunno if I speed up or everything else slows down or what, but until I lose my grip and sync up with the metronome again, it's like I'm outside of time. Weirdest shit I ever saw, the first time I did it. You would not believe the colors -- everything bleeds green like the aftermath of a lime suicide epidemic."
"Can you show me the beat?" Aradia asks, hooking her whip to her belt and walking toward her best friend. "I don't hear anything like that, but maybe it just takes practice."
"What, like you thought you could voodoo me into hearing ghosts? Remember what a clusterfuck lesson in futility that was?" Dave asks. But he sighs and sets down his sword and spends the rest of the afternoon trying to teach her to hear the living pulse of the universe like she tried to teach him to hear the whispers of the dead.
It doesn't work, but that's okay. They're together, like always, and that's what really matters.
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Trolls don't have parents like humans do. They hatch in caves out in the middle of nowhere and some grubminders collect the ones that manage to reach open air. Then they grow up in a sort of feral pack, restrained only by the grubminders' claws and weapons, until they learn how to mimic civilized behavior. And maybe, by the time they're twelve or so, they're safe to be around more delicate human children.
Or at least that's the standard line.
Dave thinks it's bullshit. There are lots of other countries where humans and trolls grow up together and hardly anyone gets killed in the process. Besides, so what? Death happens; it's as inevitable as the rhythm of time. Everything that has a beginning also has an end.
But try getting that past a bunch of lawyers.
So he's in seventh grade before he and Aradia finally get to spend more than weekends and vacations together. Bro enrolls Dave into this crazy charter school that runs mixed species programs all the way through high school, and Aradia's old enough to move into a youth hive and get her own living allowance that she uses to pay the entrance fees. They're even in most of the same classes. And it's awesome, because humans think he's weird and trolls think she's weird, so now they can be weird together and who gives a shit if they don't fit in with either species? True coolness can't be contained by such petty divisions anyway.
"Hey, Dave, can I borrow a set of pickling jars?" Aradia asks as they walk from history to math. The classes are boring -- not enough dead bodies, Aradia says, to which Dave would add no sense of pacing -- but Aradia likes coloring inside the lines and it's more ironic to ace all his tests than to live down to his teachers' expectations by failing, so Dave rolls his eyes a lot and deals.
"A whole set? What'd you dig up now?" Dave asks, shifting his backpack from one shoulder to the other.
"Nothing yet. I thought we'd go prospecting on Twelfthday," Aradia says. She pokes Dave in the side when he groans. "Bring your camera, Mister Grumpypants. I know it's not real archaeology, but any documentation is better than none."
And if he has his camera, he'll inevitably find dozens of moments worth preserving, but Aradia doesn't bother to point that out. She lets him reach his own conclusions.
"Fine, whatever, but shit better be wicked bananas, sis," Dave says as he pushes open the classroom door and holds it for her in something halfway between instinctive courtesy and ironic chivalry. "I expect at least one cold case murder victim, none of this 'oh look, a half-rotted acorn a squirrel forgot last winter, I wonder how many other trees die before they get a chance to be born?' business like last time."
Aradia is too busy pouting and insisting she doesn't sound like that to notice the other kids already in the room, human and troll alike, giving them 'oh god, the crazy people, please don't let them sit next to me' looks. Dave arches one eyebrow over the edge of his shades, just enough to say, 'yeah, I see what you're doing, assholes, wanna make something of it?' and make the idiots blink and turn aside or look down at their desks rather than meet his gaze.
Satisfied, he claims the far left seat in the third row, bows Aradia into the desk next to him, and digs out his pencil, calculator, and spiral notebook. Another hour to spend learning pre-algebra. Hooray. He may die of excitement.
Twenty minutes later his attempt to be a good student has, predictably, degenerated into doodling shitty comics -- whatever random crap pops into his head, no attempt at plot or characterization or even actual humor. (That's what makes them funny. Aradia still doesn't get the joke, but she's willing to play along when he asks her to help Mad Lib the dialogue, so that's okay.)
Dave glances over at Aradia, who is dutifully copying down whatever equation Ms. Lame-O is writing on the chalkboard. He is just about to poke her arm with his pencil and ask for a noun and an adverb when there's a flicker-flash of red-green-red, the scent of steel and lightning, and his bro and a troll lady who looks exactly like a grown-up Aradia are standing in the front of the room.
His bro is wearing his sword across his back. The troll lady is carrying two hunting knives, one at each hip. They're both dressed in red and rust and black, and there's a scarlet clockwork gear printed over Bro's heart and the lady's blood-pusher.
"Hey," says Bro.
The lady smacks him in the back of his head, knocking his hat ever so slightly askew. "Greetings," she says, all formal and shit.
Dave blinks. He's never seen anyone fast enough to touch Bro when he doesn't want to be touched. Either this lady is that good, or Bro doesn't mind her messing with his hat. Both of which are the next best thing to impossible.
"Mr. Strider?" the teacher asks, still holding the chalk in her hand like she thinks it might work as a weapon. She hasn't even gone for her stun-gun. So lame. "What-- how-- is there a family reason you need to speak with Dave?"
"You could say that," says Bro. "Hey, kiddos. Listen up -- you get a quick history lesson before you get back to math. This is the year of the Scratch, when one cycle gives way to the next. It's time for the Aspects to hand over the reins to our heirs."
"It has been one thousand twenty-five circuits of the sun since my counterpart and I took up our roles," the troll lady continues. "Now we lay them down. Aradia Megido."
"Dave Strider," says Bro.
"Come learn who you were born to be," they say in chorus, one voice high, one voice low, blurring into one.
Dave blinks. When he turns to look at Aradia, he can see she's as surprised as he is. Okay, so he knew they were weird, and he knew his bro was too cool to be normal either, but... is Bro saying he's one of the Aspects? Non-ironically?
All around them, the other kids shift restlessly, a sea of frantic whispers rising and falling. One of the trolls has started that near-subliminal growl that says 'fuck you, don't back me into a corner or we'll both be sorry,' and a few of the humans are failing to stifle nervous laughter.
"Mr. Strider, I don't know how you and your friend got into this school, but I find your joke in very poor taste," the teacher says, finally drawing her stun-gun. "The Scratch has no relevance to anyone but the Aspects, and everyone knows those are self-renewing elements of the universe, not people like you and me. You're disrupting my lesson. I insist that you leave or I'll report you to the police."
"You think this is a joke?" says Bro, suddenly behind her, leaning against the closed classroom door. Dave can almost track him these days, almost sink into the backbeat fast enough to catch more than a fading burst of lime as Bro flash-steps. To anyone else, it looks like he teleported. He hears gasps from behind him. He ignores them.
"What kind of nonsense do people believe these days?" the troll lady says, mostly to herself. "Self-renewing elements of the universe?"
"Don't lie, you know you'd go for that," says Bro. "I'm the one who bothers to have a life. It's not like we can't make the time, and what sort of guardians would we be if we didn't keep touch with actual people as well as dealing with all the mystical bullshit?"
"In any case, we are Aspects and we are here to collect our heirs," the lady says.
"Paperwork's already in the office," Bro adds. "Signed and sealed, and I don't care if you're religious or not, you know there's no faking our marks."
"Say I believe you," the teacher says, not lowering her gun. "Hypothetically, which Aspects are you? And what will happen to my students?"
Bro's lips quirk up. "She's Death, I'm Time."
The troll lady smiles, painted lips stretching around her dainty fangs. "Or conversely, I'm Time, he's Death. It's a complicated Aspect."
Dave turns to look at Aradia and finds her already staring back at him. "Your ghosts," he says.
"Your rhythm," she answers.
"Guess we know why, now," Dave says, and stands from his desk. He stuffs his shit into his bag and slings it over one shoulder. Aradia tucks her pencil into its special little pocket insider her backpack, zips everything up, and moves to stand at his side in the aisle. Her fingers are twitching, just a tiny bit, thumb picking at her other claws.
Dave reaches sideways and takes her hand.
"So when do we leave?" he asks Bro.
"Now," say the troll lady, and the whole world bleeds green.
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End of Fragment
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I think if I continued this story, it would end up as Dave<>Aradia. Not all paired Aspects would have that sort of relationship, but I think Dave and Aradia's personalities play off each other well and growing up together gives them a bedrock solid understanding of how to navigate each other's virtues, quirks, and flaws.
Dave and Aradia always knew there was something different about them, but being weird's not a problem if you're weird together. (3,750 words)
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Aspects of Immortality
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The world runs on twelves. Nobody knows why, not even the Aspects, but that's the pattern everything falls into. Except for humans, the full cycle breaks down into threes and fours, while trolls get twos and sixes. Nobody knows the reason for that either, but it's rock solid truth.
"So really, you should be a troll," Aradia tells Dave when they're both six years old and already so comfortable with the groove of their friendship that nothing can shake them out of it. "You and me makes two friends, you and your brother makes two people in your hive, you're six years old -- see?"
"Yeah? Well you should be human then, 'cause you and me and your horns makes three," Dave retorts. It's a lame response, but Aradia giggles and tosses her head to show off the awesome orange-yellow spirals of her horns, so it's like the lameness dove down through a layer of irony and turned out cool anyway. Or something like that. Dave's bro likes to talk about irony, but Dave's not sure he gets it yet. He doesn't get a lot of what his bro talks about.
"Come on, let's go down to the stream and work on our dam," Aradia says, grabbing Dave's hand and yanking him out of his thoughts. He lets her pull him through the park that straddles the boundary between the troll and human halves of Watersmeet. The stream isn't much of a stream, but their dam isn't much of a dam either -- all it really does is attract crows, who like to stand on it and puff themselves up like the feathery assholes they are.
Dave's bro says crows aren't actually death omens, but a lot of people still think they're bad luck. Aradia thinks they're cute. Dave doesn't. He throws stones at them until they flap off and do their stupid cawing thing from a distance.
Aradia gets tired of working on the dam and decides they should dig a hole and pretend they're archaeologists instead.
"What's an archaeologist?" Dave asks. He doesn't know where Aradia gets all her ideas, but she always comes up with crazy stuff and drags him along. He grumbles but he doesn't really mind -- even when her games are dumb, he likes it when she's happy.
"They dig up dead cities and mummies and stuff!" Aradia says excitedly. "And old books and jewelry and swords and--"
"Wait, mummies?" Dave interrupts. "Cool."
The hole is only one foot deep when he steps back, grabs a stick from the dam, and shouts, "Look out! The mummy's awake! It wants to suck out your heart and steal your life!"
Aradia blinks, then grins and takes off her belt. She stands at Dave's side, holding it by the buckle. "Don't worry, I'll protect you," she says. "No mummy gets to eat your blood-pusher while I'm here!" She waves the belt around like a whip.
"Psssh, other way around," Dave says, and the afternoon degenerates into flailing at each other with makeshift weapons and running around the tree-lined banks of the tiny stream until Dave's bro appears from nowhere and slings them both over his shoulders.
"Playtime's over, kiddos," he says. "Hold tight; we're heading home."
He flash-steps; the world breaks into a chain of time-lapse photographs as the city zooms past. Aradia wraps her legs around his arm, Dave sticks his hands under the strap that holds his bro's katana to his back, and they laugh at the expression on the grubminder's face when a human yanks open the group-hive's door and tosses Aradia over the threshold.
"See you next week, Dave!" Aradia says as she waves goodbye from the doorway. She's on tiptoes, practically dancing, her whole body behind the motion. Dave holds up his hand and twitches his wrist once to say 'yeah, same' without acting all uncool while Bro is watching. Aradia grins and giggles and disappears into the hive, slamming the door behind her.
It's kind of cool that she doesn't care about being cool.
"I wish Aradia went to my school," Dave says as he gets a piggyback ride home at more normal speed. (This is still totally cool because anything his bro does is automatically cool.) "Why don't humans and trolls go to the same schools?"
"Because people worry about stupid shit," his bro says. "When you're older, we'll get you into a mixed-species school. There's a couple in the city."
"Awesome," Dave says, and tips his head back to watch the huge, golden-red sun spear itself on the city skyline as it falls toward the western horizon. He likes the bright colors, and the way the sun has a pattern -- every day a little longer than the last as spring drags on toward summer -- that he can almost feel like a weight in his bones. He likes that every day ends so the next day will be new all over again.
"Shades, little man," his bro reminds him.
Dave makes a face but tugs his sunglasses back down from his forehead. The colors dim and turn kind of grayish-brown, the whole world a little dirtier and less interesting. Dave's not sure he likes wearing shades, but if his bro says he has to, he has to.
He stares straight at the sun all the way home.
Dave is eight years old before he realizes most people can't do that without going blind.
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Trolls and humans live together out of necessity rather than preference. There's only so much land area in the world, after all, and the last hundred thousand years of Marina's history has mostly been the story of two aggressive, intelligent species learning how to uneasily coexist. The Aspects help with that, a little -- they smack down any serious attempts at inter-species genocide -- but mostly the Aspects worry about the metaphysical gears of the world and let everyone else worry about the day-to-day stuff themselves.
In some countries, this means trolls rule and humans are second class citizens. In other countries, humans are on top. In Sonderland, there's an uneasy tension between the ideal that all people are created equal and the hardwired biological truth that in some ways trolls and humans are just not compatible. So everyone pays the same taxes and joins the same army, but integrated civilian housing is pretty rare, and what counts as murder among trolls isn't the same as among humans, or even between trolls and humans. And don't get Aradia started on the mess that passes for elections and Congress.
A mess was probably inevitable when troll colonies and human colonies joined forces to fight off their various parent countries, but that doesn't mean she has to like the way her schoolfeeders present it.
"Yeah, the story of history is like, people are dumb, dumb leads to fights, fights lead to war, war leads to famine and plague, everybody dies, nobody learns a fucking thing," Dave agrees. "Then they do it all over again."
"People are very, very dumb," Aradia sighs, curling up next to Dave while he plays some kind of car racing game. They spend most weekends at his apartment now instead of in the park. People are less willing to ignore trolls and humans roughhousing together when they're eleven than when they're six, and Aradia knows the wary looks bug Dave more than he'd ever admit.
Also, there are never any ghosts around his building. She doesn't mind hearing the dead -- most of them are just lonely, and they deserve to have someone pay a little attention! But it's nice to get a break now and then.
Aradia wriggles on the couch, pillowing her head more comfortably in Dave's lap. His legs are kind of thin and bony, but she likes to feel his body heat seep through the fabric of his jeans and the wiry mess of her hair, as if his blood is singing to her own. Humans can be weird about personal space, but even Dave and his brother are more open to skin contact than most trolls. "It's so frustrating, though!" she says, returning to her grievance. "History could be the most interesting class ever -- think of all the disasters and discoveries -- but I think my schoolfeeders are trying to make classes as boring as possible. Honestly, we're eleven years old. We can handle some excitement!"
"I know, right? We never get any of the cool details either," Dave says. He lifts one hand from the controller for a second and reaches down to shift Aradia's head a couple centimeters toward his knees. "Watch the horns, sis. I don't have any bone shield over my fragile meat parts."
"Humans are so badly designed," Aradia says, reaching up to poke the unprotected skin of Dave's stomach. He doesn't twitch, so she slides her hand under his shirt and tries again, angling to touch with her claws instead of the pads of her fingers. "Like tissue paper -- you crack open at a teeny tiny sneeze."
"Pfft. Get your terminology straight -- you crack, we tear. And tears are hella easier to fix," Dave says, still ignoring Aradia's effort at distraction. "Also, we can take as much heat as you can, but guess which species deals better with the cold? Oh wait, that would be humans. And don't even get me started on the gill-mutants," he adds before Aradia can bring up sea dwellers. "It doesn't count if you can't all breathe underwater. Any human can live anywhere any other human can, no matter what color skin and hair we have."
Aradia can't see his eyes through his shades, but she knows him well enough to tell that he's secretly laughing at her, all smug-pleased that he jumped on her objection before she could raise it herself.
Oh, it is on.
Aradia knocks the controller out of Dave's hands, pushes him against the back of the futon, and yanks his shirt up over his face, trapping his arms for a crucial two and a half seconds. She blows a giant raspberry over the birthdent in his stomach. Not even Dave can stay chill through that.
He makes a noise halfway between laughter and a shriek, claws his way out of his shirt, and rolls both of them right off the futon onto the musty carpet.
"Take it to the roof," Dave's bro says, appearing out of what might as well be thin air. Dave twitches under her.
"Yes sir, sorry sir, we're going sir," Aradia chirps, scrambling to her feet and grabbing her whip from the coat rack by the door. She dashes for the stairwell -- first to reach the roof has the obvious advantage of an extra second or three to adjust to direct sunlight, plus the chance to get a free strike while their opponent's dodging space is limited by the doorway. Dave snatches his sword from the umbrella stand and chases her, slamming the door behind himself.
Aradia would swear he doesn't pass her, but somehow when she reaches the roof, Dave's already there waiting by the far edge, his sword pointed down like she isn't a worthwhile threat.
He flash-stepped. He figured it out.
She poises her whip, ready to strike. "How does it work?" she demands. "We've been trying to copy you bro's flash-step since forever. When did you figure it out? Why didn't you tell me? You have to teach me!"
Dave shrugs. "I dunno if I'm doing what he does -- I mean, some days I swear Bro can fucking teleport -- but just going fast..." The corners of his mouth twitch down for a second in what would be a massive scowl on anyone but a Strider. "It's like, you know how you started hearing dead people last year? And we always know what time it is? Well, last week I started hearing this backbeat all the time, like the universe up and stuffed a metronome in my brain and hid the off button, and the thing is, I shit you not, everything moves to the beat. The whole universe is dancing like there's no tomorrow in a shitty rattrap backstreet club and the DJ never switches up the rhythm."
He pauses.
"And?" Aradia asks.
"So I step outside the beat," Dave says. He swings his sword up and rests the flat of the blade on his right shoulder. "I dunno if I speed up or everything else slows down or what, but until I lose my grip and sync up with the metronome again, it's like I'm outside of time. Weirdest shit I ever saw, the first time I did it. You would not believe the colors -- everything bleeds green like the aftermath of a lime suicide epidemic."
"Can you show me the beat?" Aradia asks, hooking her whip to her belt and walking toward her best friend. "I don't hear anything like that, but maybe it just takes practice."
"What, like you thought you could voodoo me into hearing ghosts? Remember what a clusterfuck lesson in futility that was?" Dave asks. But he sighs and sets down his sword and spends the rest of the afternoon trying to teach her to hear the living pulse of the universe like she tried to teach him to hear the whispers of the dead.
It doesn't work, but that's okay. They're together, like always, and that's what really matters.
---------------
Trolls don't have parents like humans do. They hatch in caves out in the middle of nowhere and some grubminders collect the ones that manage to reach open air. Then they grow up in a sort of feral pack, restrained only by the grubminders' claws and weapons, until they learn how to mimic civilized behavior. And maybe, by the time they're twelve or so, they're safe to be around more delicate human children.
Or at least that's the standard line.
Dave thinks it's bullshit. There are lots of other countries where humans and trolls grow up together and hardly anyone gets killed in the process. Besides, so what? Death happens; it's as inevitable as the rhythm of time. Everything that has a beginning also has an end.
But try getting that past a bunch of lawyers.
So he's in seventh grade before he and Aradia finally get to spend more than weekends and vacations together. Bro enrolls Dave into this crazy charter school that runs mixed species programs all the way through high school, and Aradia's old enough to move into a youth hive and get her own living allowance that she uses to pay the entrance fees. They're even in most of the same classes. And it's awesome, because humans think he's weird and trolls think she's weird, so now they can be weird together and who gives a shit if they don't fit in with either species? True coolness can't be contained by such petty divisions anyway.
"Hey, Dave, can I borrow a set of pickling jars?" Aradia asks as they walk from history to math. The classes are boring -- not enough dead bodies, Aradia says, to which Dave would add no sense of pacing -- but Aradia likes coloring inside the lines and it's more ironic to ace all his tests than to live down to his teachers' expectations by failing, so Dave rolls his eyes a lot and deals.
"A whole set? What'd you dig up now?" Dave asks, shifting his backpack from one shoulder to the other.
"Nothing yet. I thought we'd go prospecting on Twelfthday," Aradia says. She pokes Dave in the side when he groans. "Bring your camera, Mister Grumpypants. I know it's not real archaeology, but any documentation is better than none."
And if he has his camera, he'll inevitably find dozens of moments worth preserving, but Aradia doesn't bother to point that out. She lets him reach his own conclusions.
"Fine, whatever, but shit better be wicked bananas, sis," Dave says as he pushes open the classroom door and holds it for her in something halfway between instinctive courtesy and ironic chivalry. "I expect at least one cold case murder victim, none of this 'oh look, a half-rotted acorn a squirrel forgot last winter, I wonder how many other trees die before they get a chance to be born?' business like last time."
Aradia is too busy pouting and insisting she doesn't sound like that to notice the other kids already in the room, human and troll alike, giving them 'oh god, the crazy people, please don't let them sit next to me' looks. Dave arches one eyebrow over the edge of his shades, just enough to say, 'yeah, I see what you're doing, assholes, wanna make something of it?' and make the idiots blink and turn aside or look down at their desks rather than meet his gaze.
Satisfied, he claims the far left seat in the third row, bows Aradia into the desk next to him, and digs out his pencil, calculator, and spiral notebook. Another hour to spend learning pre-algebra. Hooray. He may die of excitement.
Twenty minutes later his attempt to be a good student has, predictably, degenerated into doodling shitty comics -- whatever random crap pops into his head, no attempt at plot or characterization or even actual humor. (That's what makes them funny. Aradia still doesn't get the joke, but she's willing to play along when he asks her to help Mad Lib the dialogue, so that's okay.)
Dave glances over at Aradia, who is dutifully copying down whatever equation Ms. Lame-O is writing on the chalkboard. He is just about to poke her arm with his pencil and ask for a noun and an adverb when there's a flicker-flash of red-green-red, the scent of steel and lightning, and his bro and a troll lady who looks exactly like a grown-up Aradia are standing in the front of the room.
His bro is wearing his sword across his back. The troll lady is carrying two hunting knives, one at each hip. They're both dressed in red and rust and black, and there's a scarlet clockwork gear printed over Bro's heart and the lady's blood-pusher.
"Hey," says Bro.
The lady smacks him in the back of his head, knocking his hat ever so slightly askew. "Greetings," she says, all formal and shit.
Dave blinks. He's never seen anyone fast enough to touch Bro when he doesn't want to be touched. Either this lady is that good, or Bro doesn't mind her messing with his hat. Both of which are the next best thing to impossible.
"Mr. Strider?" the teacher asks, still holding the chalk in her hand like she thinks it might work as a weapon. She hasn't even gone for her stun-gun. So lame. "What-- how-- is there a family reason you need to speak with Dave?"
"You could say that," says Bro. "Hey, kiddos. Listen up -- you get a quick history lesson before you get back to math. This is the year of the Scratch, when one cycle gives way to the next. It's time for the Aspects to hand over the reins to our heirs."
"It has been one thousand twenty-five circuits of the sun since my counterpart and I took up our roles," the troll lady continues. "Now we lay them down. Aradia Megido."
"Dave Strider," says Bro.
"Come learn who you were born to be," they say in chorus, one voice high, one voice low, blurring into one.
Dave blinks. When he turns to look at Aradia, he can see she's as surprised as he is. Okay, so he knew they were weird, and he knew his bro was too cool to be normal either, but... is Bro saying he's one of the Aspects? Non-ironically?
All around them, the other kids shift restlessly, a sea of frantic whispers rising and falling. One of the trolls has started that near-subliminal growl that says 'fuck you, don't back me into a corner or we'll both be sorry,' and a few of the humans are failing to stifle nervous laughter.
"Mr. Strider, I don't know how you and your friend got into this school, but I find your joke in very poor taste," the teacher says, finally drawing her stun-gun. "The Scratch has no relevance to anyone but the Aspects, and everyone knows those are self-renewing elements of the universe, not people like you and me. You're disrupting my lesson. I insist that you leave or I'll report you to the police."
"You think this is a joke?" says Bro, suddenly behind her, leaning against the closed classroom door. Dave can almost track him these days, almost sink into the backbeat fast enough to catch more than a fading burst of lime as Bro flash-steps. To anyone else, it looks like he teleported. He hears gasps from behind him. He ignores them.
"What kind of nonsense do people believe these days?" the troll lady says, mostly to herself. "Self-renewing elements of the universe?"
"Don't lie, you know you'd go for that," says Bro. "I'm the one who bothers to have a life. It's not like we can't make the time, and what sort of guardians would we be if we didn't keep touch with actual people as well as dealing with all the mystical bullshit?"
"In any case, we are Aspects and we are here to collect our heirs," the lady says.
"Paperwork's already in the office," Bro adds. "Signed and sealed, and I don't care if you're religious or not, you know there's no faking our marks."
"Say I believe you," the teacher says, not lowering her gun. "Hypothetically, which Aspects are you? And what will happen to my students?"
Bro's lips quirk up. "She's Death, I'm Time."
The troll lady smiles, painted lips stretching around her dainty fangs. "Or conversely, I'm Time, he's Death. It's a complicated Aspect."
Dave turns to look at Aradia and finds her already staring back at him. "Your ghosts," he says.
"Your rhythm," she answers.
"Guess we know why, now," Dave says, and stands from his desk. He stuffs his shit into his bag and slings it over one shoulder. Aradia tucks her pencil into its special little pocket insider her backpack, zips everything up, and moves to stand at his side in the aisle. Her fingers are twitching, just a tiny bit, thumb picking at her other claws.
Dave reaches sideways and takes her hand.
"So when do we leave?" he asks Bro.
"Now," say the troll lady, and the whole world bleeds green.
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End of Fragment
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I think if I continued this story, it would end up as Dave<>Aradia. Not all paired Aspects would have that sort of relationship, but I think Dave and Aradia's personalities play off each other well and growing up together gives them a bedrock solid understanding of how to navigate each other's virtues, quirks, and flaws.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-08-16 08:07 pm (UTC)... it feels weird for bro to be Time too though, even though the logic of flashstep + Death checks out XD;
i wonder how the other aspects would be paired up. o.o did you worldbuild more than that?
(no subject)
Date: 2013-08-17 07:59 am (UTC)My notion is that for trolls, inheriting an Aspect is a strict Ancestor-to-Descendant thing, but for humans the potential runs in certain family lines. So all the Derse dreamers (plus two of the OCs) are distantly related, as are all the Prospit dreamers (and the other two OCs).
Originally this was going to be more straight-up urban fantasy set on Earth, but then I thought that if the trolls didn't get to keep Alternia, the humans shouldn't get to keep Earth, so I kind of handwaved it into a mashup world. I toyed with calling the new planet Afteria, but that implies this is the result of the game so I went with Marina instead because I never claimed my sense of humor was any good. *wry*
The general idea was that Bro and the Demoness took Aradia and Dave off to some isolated place -- Marina has a lot of open wilderness, both because trolls need it and because the Aspects are big on environmental balance -- to meet the other Aspects' heirs. Some of the other kids would know each other vaguely through the internet, or have met in person for one reason or another, but Dave and Aradia are the only ones who both grew up together and share an Aspect (and therefore helped each other explore their powers), so they're still a little weird even among other kids who are theoretically in the same boat.
And then plot. Which I never did get around to, alas; I was mostly having fun writing Aradia and Dave being cute together. Ah well.