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Defragmentation

Summary:

A gamebreaking glitch tore the game session to shreds, right before they reached the end. Dirk Strider was already dead at the time. Temporarily. Which left him to revive in the aftermath. As the Prince of Heart, he doesn't have much experience putting souls back together, only breaking them, but at this point he seems to be the only one who even knows shit is broken.

He's the last person who'd trust himself with this. Not when he's out of time, out of place, and over his head being responsible for a little brother, a life, and a body his conveniently dead asshole of a splinterself already, thoroughly fucked up.

AKA: A game crash creates an unholy mashup of who the hell knows how many sburb sessions, and Dirk-as-Bro attempts to figure out wtf happened and how to fix shit for the brother who fears him, and the friends who don’t remember him. Because that’s what he does. But no Dirk has ever excelled when truly alone. Good thing he isn’t, he just needs to learn how to accept the help.

Notes:

Follows Divided by Zero almost immediately, though you don't necessarily need to read it. Just know that things got eff'd up, and the game crashed completely.

Not Acknowledging the Epilogues in Any Way.

Current Update Schedule: Tuesdays and Fridays; status updates get posted to katreal-fic.tumblr.com on those days when there isn't an update (these include out of context quotes)

Notes: Heavy use of in-text colors. For best readability, please do not use a site skin that changes the text color significantly away from black.

(See the end of the work for more notes and other works inspired by this one.)

Chapter 1: [A1] Dirk > Quietly Freak the Fuck Out

Chapter Text

Everything is in pieces. But that’s nothing new. You are a Prince of Heart. Splinters are your life. You make splinters. You may have only recently learned how to harness your Princely powers to tear out other people’s souls, but you’ve always had a knack for tearing your own to shreds, even when you weren’t trying.

These splinters don’t resonate in that same way, don’t camp themselves into a corner of your mind and exist, thrumming along with your heartbeat in a constant reminder. These are all just a chaotic mess of sharp edges and broken glass, scattered across a dark void you are pretty sure isn’t the medium, or even the Furthest Ring. It feels…

Empty, aside from the glimmer of a thousand dead stars dancing at your fingertips.

Your name is Dirk Strider and you’re pretty sure you were dead a moment ago. Maybe you are dead for good, even with the revolving door that ascending to god-tier opens up. Before that agonizing moment of force ramming through you, you just remember staring at Dave’s face, his hands as they clenched against the bone white hilt of his sword, willing him to just go ahead and take the shot. You’ve lost your head purposefully before, because getting into the game would save all your friends lives. Even this right now would be an even better reason because ridding the world of these two splinters of Jack Noir would increase the odds of everyone else surviving and you are okay with that.

And then. The tolling, a terrible tolling of a clock, ringing louder and louder and louder until everything just...stopped,  the gears coming to a screeching end and shattering across the universe and birthing the plane of nothingness you now inhabit.

It was a very strange sensation. Not unlike when you first woke up on Derse all those years ago. Floating in a limbo, unable to see anything through bleary eyes that didn’t quite know how to process the medium before the medium existed. While you’d never reached Roxy’s levels of dream-walking, it had taken several of these muddled half-nightmares, and Calliope’s cheerful explanations before you’d woken enough to start your scheming.

Your new status as the Prince of Heart though, that changed things. You couldn’t be dreaming because your dreamself is dead. That’s how you earned these god-tier puffy asshole pants in the first place. Taken your place in the pantheon and cast off your mortal coil or some shit. Not that it had mattered, it hadn’t smoothed down the sharp edges from where you’d broken bits off of your soul to create your auto-responder nearly three years ago. It just made the loss all the more noticeable.

You can’t find him. Or Arquiusprite, as he’d finally settled into after you’d fulfilled your promise. He’d always burned in that corner of your mind, laughing at you. A reminder of your hubris, of failings, a dark mirror that twisted and churned in your stomach as it threw back everything you hated about yourself. But it was gone. It almost hurt to feel so empty.

Was this where players went when they died? You don’t remember it being full of sharp, broken edges, glinting in the darkness of the furthest ring. More like...pockets of space, surrounded by an eerie murmuring that had resonated in your bones the entire flight back.

You recalled waking up there once, after being knocked out twice in both your waking and dreaming selves, watching Jake beat up some weird aquatic punk ghost. You’d been a passively observing brain ghost lodged in your boyfriend-to-be’s brain and then suddenly completely embodied, your head splitting as memories from your two (and a phantom) selves tried to squeeze themselves into a single span of time. It made that time pretty blurry though, in recollection. You’d just had way too much crap going on what with trying to make sure none of your friends died completely before you managed to get inside the game, and you hadn’t just been able to slip back out of your dreamself into the waking world like you normally would considering the lights weren’t on at home...

You don’t think you feel dead. Did anyone feel dead? You needed to get back to Dave and the others if you could at all. Had his gambit worked? Did Dave manage to take out both Jacks? And what about Roxy and the Batterwitch? Or Jake and his solo mission? You hated being out of the loop, what if something happened to your friends while you were trapped in this place?

Frustrated, you brush mental fingers against the edge of one of the shards surrounding you, searching for something, anything, that would tell you what happened here. Some of them felt utterly alien. Incomprehensible nonsense. Like looking at a program written in a language you didn’t have the syntax for. You keep looking, sifting through the debris field. Mixed in with the alien logic were the occasional glimpses, flashes. Not yours, but close enough that you could feel it resonate with your soul, plucking at that sense of self with a quiet here! I’m here!

That familiar-but-not-quite shard led to another, one held on by nothing more than a spider-thin strand of silk. Nothing more than a splinter of a memory, but it felt like you . An anchor. It’s--just like Derse. Like before the game, as your mind slipped from one world to the next.

You let your awareness slide along the edge of your broken soul, coasting the jagged pieces like how you’d always imagined your bro had done, tearing up a rail on a shitty artifacted skateboard. Weight and solidity settled around you like a well worn coat, you unconsciously wrapped yourself in it--and breathed.

...And then fell over hacking. You stumble forward, something hard and sharp catching and digging into your stomach. Countertop? Felt like it. But your eyes were watering as that same something in the air burned at them. A dull roar builds in your ears as you focus on dragging air into lungs you’d forgotten you had--you haven’t needed to breathe since you’d gotten yourself killed on your quest bed. Was that really only a day ago? It felt like eons, getting slapped beyond the incipisphere and then flying and Dave and Jack and dying--

If nothing else, the burning in your lungs, the counter digging into palms. It all whispered that this was real . If you were dead, if this was just a shred of memory, would you be hunched over what your blurry vision could only call a sink, hacking up a lung like you’d gone exploring the Land of Tombs and Krypton without your mask? You lived on that planet with it’s thick gasses and poison filled atmosphere for half a year, this acrid soupy air and oppressive heat should be nothing .

Eyes watering behind your shades, you fumble for the faucet--at least you think it’s a faucet. This feels like your apartment and you roll with it, the shape of the nozzle is the same under your hand as it’s been for the last sixteen years. You push your shades up into your hair--they bump into something already there, knocking it off your head--burying your face in hands cupping lukewarm water, and just try to breathe. The water, while never as cold as you wanted, worked to ease the prickle in your eyes. The water sloshed to the dirty metal sink-- no that was wrong you kept it spotless because what else did you have to do for half a year there were only so many tombs to explore-- and you grabbed another handful, this time it slid down your throat. Carefully, oh so carefully. With the way your lungs were protesting it would be far too easy for the liquid to end up somewhere it shouldn’t and you didn’t know if the game simulated pneumonia but you wouldn’t put it past it.

“B-bro?”

A tiny, quivering voice had you jerking your head up. The sky outside the window above the sink was blood red over a wide expanse of slate grey and glass, not the poison green and black of your planet, or even the endless blue of your home. You turn stiffly, water running in rivulets down your face and caught in your eyelashes as you try to blink the burning grit away.

And then you look down, into a small face that was torn between all too familiar indifference and cracked with something else. Small pale hands clutched an orange baseball cap, holding it out hesitantly.

You…can’t deal with this right now. Your burning lungs. Your irritated eyes. The screaming in your woefully inefficient meatbag brain that knew this was wrong wrong wrong.

Your mind blanks out. Full on fucking blue screen of death’d that shit. You feel your hands take the cap, and some part of your brain that sounds suspiciously like Hal notes with satisfaction  that your voice doesn’t waver at all, although it sounds wrong to your ears. “Thanks Dave.”

The too young Dave Strider manages a too-cool-to-actually-be-cool nod and absconds out of the kitchen, slamming the door to a room-- his room?-- behind him.

Gravity is a constant battle, and your too shocked limbs aren’t even trying to put on a show, so you let yourself sink to the floor, stained cabinet to your back. But you don’t stop there, sliding away from the body and back into the welcoming darkness of the void, surrounded by the remnants of tiny stars and clutch at your puffy asshole god-tier pants like they were a lifeline because of what they represent. What the fuck. What the fuck, man.

Are you dead???

A tiny star burns in the previously empty corner of your mind and all you can smell is that burning, pollution filled entirely not flooded Houston air. If you try you know you could slip right back into that body because that’s what you did for years. Only that body is not fucking yours.

You are dimly aware of your--his--shades clattering to the linoleum floor, like it’s a distant dream and you only need to open your eyes to wake up.  You squeeze them shut, your palms forcing your real shades into your face and very quietly, you take a moment to freak the fuck out.