BRO STRIDER:

Here’s a roleplay starter starring fanon Bro Strider “waking” (resurrected) after the game has been won to Davesprite screaming from a nightmare.

Anguished screaming tears through Bro’s subconscious like a hot knife through butter. He jolts and bounds forward, on his feet before awareness begins to nibble at the mangled edges of consciousness. Bro’s heart beats a frantic staccato against his ribs as he ducks down into a protective crouch, his arms pulled in tight against his body. His eyes dart from one frenzied corner of the room to the next, agitatedly searching for the source of the awful bleating and crying.

It’s not here. It’s not in this room.

Bro jerkily sucks in shallow breaths as he makes for the hallway. He’s in his apartment, in the living room. He’d been stationed on the couch and he must have drifted off because he doesn’t remember falling asleep. The last thing he recalls is — is — dying? “Shit,” he says, his voice monotone with a calm he doesn’t feel. All he knows is that there was a pimped-out orange Dave, sleek with feathers and a cry not unlike the soon-to-be-dead thing screeching down the hall.

His legs trip over nothing, oxygen, and Bro stumbles; his arms snap out and he grabs whatever’s nearest — the 60” tv. It tips unsteadily under his weight before pitching forward and crashing at his feet with the kind of noise that would haunt Bro’s dreams if there weren’t something else giving it a run for its money. “Motherfucker, ” Bro grunts, his eyes narrowing beneath his shades as he shakily runs a hand through his hair.

This was not how he imagined his day going. His afterlife? Fuck if he knows, is he even alive?

There’s a hollow ache growing inside him. It’s accompanied by a nagging thought that has him hooking his fingers up under his polo shirt and yanking it up and off his shoulders. Instead of the tanned, lightly scarred chest he’s used to, there’s hard-to-miss healing scar tissue. It’s centered on his chest and vividly pink, almost as raw as he’s sure it was when there was a sword impaled inside him. Bro scrapes a thumbnail over it and feels nothing but pressure. The nerves are dead then, he thinks idly, but I might be alive.

Huh, well that’s something, but it doesn’t explain the — the screaming cuts off as abruptly as it began and Bro hesitates only a moment before flash-stepping and stumbling down the thin length of the hallway. His legs feel like weights are strapped to them, but that doesn’t stop him from kicking in the door like it’s wet cardboard. He aims for the hinges and it unhooks itself from the frame with a crunch that has him grinding his teeth together.

Bird Dave is inside, now with a solitary wing and a sword buried deep in his chest like it’s a style that’s catching. His face is contorted into a gruesome rictus, his talons spread across his expression like he’s trying to catch the look of acute horror and lock it back inside. Bro can feel the way his heart hammers against his chest, can see it’s mirrored inside of Dave like they’re part of the world’s worst horror club and they’re badly failing the intake.

“Sup, birdbrain?” Bro croaks, his voice rough but riding on deadened nerves. He says it like any of this is normal, like he regularly intrudes on bird boys losing their shit the loudest way possible. His ears are still ringing and Bro thinks he’ll hear those deafening screams for the rest of his life. Not a great way to start the morning (or was it afternoon?), but hell, he’s had worse.

“Scale of one to ten,” Bro continues and his voice evens out into something more normal as he speaks, “Four. Your impression of an alarm clock leaves a lot to be desired. It was like you took a ripe, stinking dump all over my pancakes and, I gotta say, I didn’t love it.” He places extra emphasis on the “t” and slowly rolls an eyebrow, though it doesn’t peek up over the length of his shades. “So what’s with all the shrieking? Could have sworn a crow took a punch to the solar plexus.”

*

AU where Bro died and landed himself in the dreambubbles, only it was Dove (female Davesprite) that found him.

Sweat leaks from the small of Bro’s back and leaves a wet, tacky trail that he promptly ignores; it makes his shirt cling to his shoulders as he flash-steps, disappearing faster than the eye can track. The boiling heat of LOHAC doesn’t give him pause, he has eyes only for Davesprite and that smart mouth of his. All it’d taken was one stray, disrespectful comment about Lil Cal, and Bro was keen to teach him a lesson. They’d raised the little shit together, though it was hard to tell what with the wing, the stub, and lack of legs. He looked like Dave, but he clearly wasn’t his. He’d have known better.

Gritting his teeth together, Bro lunges forward. Their blades clash together, the clang of metal interspersed with heavy panting and the sound of wingbeats. “Not bad,” Bro says, impressed despite himself because he’s not holding back. He’s not fighting to kill, but to disarm — but if something happens, then so be it. It speaks highly of Davesprite’s skill that he’s able to meet Bro head on like this, that despite the almost demure posturing before the fight, he’s just as aggressive as Bro is. It’s almost as though he knows that it’s the easiest way to keep Bro off-guard, to back him into a corner. It’s also when he’s at his most dangerous.

Bro leaps upward at the same moment that Davesprite does, but he’s quicker and when he sees an opening, he takes it. Goopy, orange blood splatters everything present in a thin spray, and the sprite’s head flies over the side of the steel structure and takes a long tumble into the lava below. It sizzles as it burns and dissolves, catching fire before collapsing in on itself. Bro lands on his feet with quiet, cat-like grace, neon blood dribbling from his shitty katana as he watches Davesprite’s body collapse in a heap. The faint echo of something urgent flairs inside him, but it’s far overshadowed by vicious satisfaction. Bro nudges the body with the tip of his shoe and —

Jerking upright, Bro shoots up from his futon; the thin sheet he’d been using as a blanket tumbles to the ground and disappears from view. “Shit,” Bro hisses, his heart racing and his mouth sticky and dry. Pressing a hand to his heart, Bro rubs shaky fingers against his chest and fails to calm himself down as he blinks stupidly into the early morning light. The sweat is familiar and uncomfortable as he swings his legs over the side of the futon and pushes himself to his feet. For a disorienting moment, Bro isn’t altogether sure what timeline he’s in, and the thought makes his stomach schwoop and pain coil behind his temples.

‘Kid. Where’s the kid?’ Bro thinks, wheeling around the living room. Panic is an orchestra blaring a cacophony in his ears as he half-walks, half-runs down the hallway. He checks Dave’s room first, but it’s empty. Bathroom? Nothing. Kitchen? Nada. The entire apartment is clear except for him, and the knot sitting heavy in his guts becomes a ball of anxiety. It’s not like Bro knows what to do with that. It’s not something he’s familiar with. It doesn’t sit well with him, so it’s no surprise when he turns and puts his fist through the drywall in the kitchen just to the left of the tiling. His knuckles are bruised and a little bloody when he removes his hand, but he feels better, more solid, like a person.

The last place Bro hasn’t checked is the roof, and it’s like someone is squeezing their fist around his heart when he thinks he might be alone. He’s halfway up the stairs when he remembers that Dove is a lady and that as a one, she deserves certain privileges, such as not being forced to endure his nudity. Five minutes later, he’s clad in a pair of boxers, and when he throws open the doors and steps into the rising sun on the roof and sees her sitting there, it suddenly feels like he can breathe again. His first instinct when he sees her is to push her over the edge, to watch her fall to her death, if only because she made him cycle through so much emotion that it makes him feel vulnerable.

It upsets him more and Bro doesn’t know how to process that. He’s not stupid enough to believe that the ‘dream’ he’d had was simply that, but he doesn’t know how else to qualify it. He’ll have to ask if he wants to know more, but that requires him being vulnerable with her, which is admittedly easier than it would be with Dave, but he’d still rather eat chalk or shit bricks (which, hell, considering his IBS, he does that on the daily anyway) than chat.

“Hey,” Bro says, dropping into the spot beside Dove. He glances over at her, and admires the way the light highlights her face. “They call it L’Appel du Vide or the Call of the Void,” Bro says as though they were mid conversation. He leans back onto his hands, his right one visibly battered and bloodied. “Like to hear its siren’s song and turn my back on it.”