DIRK STRIDER:

If you’re familiar with Homestuck 2 and Dirk’s plotline there, this is Dirk going back into the game after it’s been won to fuck around with the code.

Dirk drives his hands into the pulpy dirt, his fingers digging deep until his wrists are all that’s visible. Beneath his palms, the damp soil sticks to him, comforting in its weight despite the way it dirties his nails. Dirk forces himself to focus, to ignore the instinctive need to stim and scrunch his fingers in the soil until he’s satisfied, the unignorable urge playing havoc with his brain. Closing his eyes, Dirk pictures lines of code spreading out before and around him, made of light and entirely holographic.

The code ticks by slowly at first, but increases with fervor, thousands and then hundreds of thousands of lines racing by at a speed he can barely see, much less process. Dirk instinctively knows what he’s looking for, and as the text slows to a bleary stop in front of him, he feels vaguely disoriented, disjointed, his heart beating a frantic staccato in his ears. Everything’s blurry and unreadable, hovering in a circular motion around him in neon orange, but all Dirk has to do is crook a pinky finger and the text sharpens until it's crisp and painfully clear.

Dirk doesn’t read the code so much as he absorbs it and becomes it. He knows it as he does himself and every one of his perceived faults. He has more than there are freckles on his body; they’re hidden and out of sight, but inescapably many. It nags at him, but he pushes it away as he pictures and wills the code to respond, to make it accessible to him. An invisible thread is plucked, one of Dirk’s fingers flexing against the dirt, and he watches as the reverberation changes the code. The tremor blurs the entire passage of text, and it vibrates not unlike a chordophone string.

It’s not the first time Dirk’s done this, nor the twenty-second or even the sixtieth. He’s done it quadruple the amount of time he’s been piercing The Medium, and he’s been here nearly every day for four months. It’s exactly as they left it, and even the consorts are still here, minding their business and paying him no heed as he strides around LOWAS. They wouldn’t be so uncaring, Dirk surmises, if they had any idea of what he was up to.

It’d started as a nattering, half-formed thought, a what if question he hadn’t been able to banish. Was it possible, he’d wondered in what was clearly a terminal case of dumbassery, to make a passage in The Medium and force his way through it? Ridiculous, he’d known, there was no way to backtrack his progress, and yet, it was a loose tooth he couldn’t help but probe. Dirk pondered it for two months, his eyes unseeing as he lay flat on his bed. The answer came to him when he was on the edge of slumber, dreams forming beneath his eyelids as he succumbed to sleep.

Dirk stands on the precipice of a cliff, a blindfold wrapped around his eyes. This is not a trust fall, Dirk knows, and he doesn’t have to see over the edge to know that death awaits him like a gaping maw, ready to swallow him whole. He toes the lip of the cliffside and feels an inch of it crumble beneath the bottom of his shoe with a scraping noise. Taking a deep breath, Dirk doesn’t hesitate to propel himself forward, and then he’s falling, his arms windmilling as he plummets head over heels. The roiling of his stomach can’t be mistaken as anything other than fear. His palms are sweaty as he slaps them together, the sting bouncing off of them as he throws his arms open.

It takes Dirk a giddy moment to recognize that the squiggles developing in his mind’s eye are Python, the primary coding language he uses for his robotics. It screams past and around him when he opens his eyes, projecting itself in fragmented bursts that indicate that if x does y, then z must happen. It’s both complicated and simple in the same breath, a sweet, wet revelation on a tongue dehydrated. Dirk doesn’t think, but reaches with his heart powers to make it a reality; a portal unzips itself forty feet below him, and Dirk’s heart is in his throat as he falls into it.

He’d fallen out of bed, and the impact had woken him. Scrambling to his feet, Dirk had thrown himself into his computer chair and spent the rest of the night typing frantically. It’d taken half a month to get the coding just right, to memorize it until he could recite it even in his dreams. It was only then that he’d attempted it, aspirations that he didn’t dare voice on the tip of his tongue. His time in The Medium had been the happiest of his life. It’d been full of strife, and he’d died more than once, but he’d had close connections with his friends and a whole life ahead of him that looked almost too bright. He’d do anything for a chance to relive it, to experience the euphoria of touch again, to be needed and looked at like he was important.

It’d lead him here, his hands buried in the dirt and his eyes squeezed shut. His face scrunches with concentration as he writes code in his head, his brows furrowing and the tip of his tongue peeking from his lips. Dirk can feel it taking hold, settling into the game like a patch, making connections, and opening new ones for him to manipulate. He rolls his wrists, slowly pulling his hands back from the soil as his fingers curl around something solid and warm and soft. He coaxes it up from the dirt, pausing only to carefully push to his knees and then his feet when it just keeps going. Dirk can feel it moving beneath his hands, and his heart races at the thought that maybe this is Arquiusprite, though the truth is that he’d been desperately casting a net, eager for any sprite he might catch.

Dirk only dares to open his eyes once the code fades from his mind’s eye, and the sprite he’s holding begins to squirm. Sucking in a sharp breath, Dirk peeks first one and then the other eye open. It’s Davesprite, he realizes, a shock of recognition jolting through him. They’ve never spoken before, which, Dirk supposes, is better than Arquiusprite, who would have been awkward at best, and hostile at worst. Letting go of the dirt-speckled sprite, Dirk drops his hands to his sides, and blinks. He hadn’t expected to get this far. Other than the consorts, he’d been unable to draw anything out of the medium other than Davesprite. It was nearly as dead as it looked, or, at least, he hadn’t stumbled across the right lines of code yet. A preliminary search of a handful of planets had suggested that The Medium was dormant, and Dirk doesn’t know what to do with that when what he desires is to reset it.

“That was some entrance,” Dirk says instead of breathing or keeping his mouth shut or saying something sensible. “You sundered from the planet like a chestburster from some unfortunate chucklefuck’s guts. All you need is some gore and a little viscera, and it’d be identical.” He’s rambling, anxiety at being made to explain himself unfurling inside him. He doesn’t even know what he’s going to say, he hadn’t expected it to work, though he’d wanted it to. The last thing he wants is to be judged by some alternate bird Dave; the expression directed his way has sweat beading his temple.