title: Lambda Session Notes
fandom: Homestuck
characters: DS♥JE, DS♦RL
rating: G
length: 1200
content notes: none
author notes: Canon is currently exploring its own do-over in the form of a hard reset from the beta session to the alpha. This is yet another iteration of the do-over cycle: lambda session, the one where they're all lesbians. Someone on the anon meme was musing about it and I...got obsessed.
summary: "You do not panic easily. You basically never panic. Striders don't panic."


You come to under looming mangroves, sand in your screaming mouth, smoke in your eyes.

Your left shoulder is dislocated; you close your eyes and ram it against the gnarled aerial root behind you. When it pops back into the socket, the crack sounds like gunfire and you want to puke.

There are screams in the distance. Inhuman ones, bellows and shrieks.

You whisper her name, your voice as husky and needful as you always imagined it would be: Jackie.

There is no answer. Even if there is, it is lost as you hack-cough-spit the sand from your throat. It is clumped around threads of blood.

*

-- timaeusTestified [TT] began pestering tipsyGnostalgic [TG] at ??:¿! --
TT: Made it.
TT: Barely, but I'm here.
TT: Where are you?
TT: ...
TT: R?
TT: where the fuck are you this shit isnt funny
TT: please
-- timaeusTestified [TT] ceased pestering tipsyGnostalgic [TG] at ¿¿:!λ --

*

You do not panic easily. You basically never panic.

Striders don't panic. Survivors, and you're nothing if not a survivor, never panic.

There is, however, a first time and spooky fucking place for everything. This is the time and place.

Monster Island. Island of Lost Souls. The Island Time Forgot.

It's always an island. Why is it always an island? (Of course you have some thoughts about that - archetypes of isolation and persistence through uncontrollable, unfathomable change, pop cultural narratives of loss - but now is not the time [haha] for that.)

As pop-cultural depictions go, you have long been partial to the Russian-Ukrainian co-production Island of the Unwanted, preferring it to LOST or any iteration of the good Dr. Moreau.

The Unwanted: that particular name is freakishly appropriate for where you are right now.

Whatever you call it - and that depended on your mood as well as your audience - this is the last place in the world you want to be. In these circumstances. (It's not as if you haven't envisioned, imagined, and thoroughly planned any number of scenarios in which you finally meet her. Face to face, in the [warm, strong, beautiful] flesh.)

When the shit hits the fan, when all hope is rapidly draining away, when the darkest hour lowers itself, make for the island.

That was the plan. It wasn't a particularly good plan, a fact which bothers you down to the bones. Such is the nature of stopgap last-gasp crapsack plans of utter desperation. You hacked the sendificator, enlarging it enough to contain (you hoped) your body, hunched over, arms wrapped around your knees, head tucked down.

Crash position assumed, time travel initiated, Jackie here you went.

Hopefully.

No plan should ever conclude with that particular inapt adverb. It is the mark of a wish and a dream; it deconstructs the very concept of a plan.

*

Your shades are cracked like each lens was deliberately ground under a heel. The screen-images projected on them have likewise fractured. To read the text, you have to close one eye and squint the other to focus on the largest shard.

TT: locate roxy
TT: AR? You there?
TT: It seems you have asked about DS's chat client auto-responder. This is an application designed to simulate DS's otherwise inimitably rad typing style, tone, cadence, personality, and substance of retort while she is away from the computer.
TT: Yo.
TT: Not funny.
TT: Opposite of funny, see also: you.
TT: ?
TT: Come on.
TT: It seems DS is no longer of consequence. Please refer further inquiries to this account, c/o Crockercorp.

Well, fuck. That's chilling.

*

You make it to higher ground by dusk. Fires, too many to count, dot the island. White-skinned beasts stampede to the south, hurling themselves into the water like lemmings.

Enormous lemmings, lemmings the size of old-fashioned city buses, lemmings with brains gone frothy and gooey with terror.

You can relate, a fact that would make Roxy hoot with soused laughter. Dina Strider, coolkid of the half-millennium, feeling a twinge of empathy. It really is the end of the world.

Breathing hard, sweating from every pore, you take shelter in another grove. This one is composed of trees never before seen on Earth, purplish-green with sawtooth leaves and bone-white roots twisting through the soft dirt. Monster trees, corpse-husks of something even worse, something that's now on the move.

Jackie grew up here. Alone but never lonely. You don't know how she did that, raised by ghouls and ghosts, playing with alien skulls and dead monsters in small jars, shooting first and asking never, and yet she still turned out amazing.

You can't reach her. You don't dare use the hacked accounts, or any of your numerous proxies, just in case you haven't yet been tracked and located.

You better hope she's safe.

You do not like to rely on hope, but that's all you've got right now.

No, fuck that. This is your fault. You should have planned better, you should have been able to foresee this. Of course the Batterwitch reigns temporally as well as spatially; only a stupid fuck would assume otherwise.

Congratulations, you are that stupid fuck. For all you know (squat; you truly are little more than a drooling moron), you led her right to the island. To Jackie.

DS is no longer of consequence. As if you ever were. You have long known what your role is, and it's not the hero. Dave was not the hero, and you, my dear, definitely are not. You teach, instruct, train, guide, prepare, the heroes, you give it your all, and then you get the fuck out of the way. Such is the way of the Strider, then, now, forevermore.

A-fucking-men. If there is one thing - other than Jackie, and Jane, and Roxy (RIP) - that you believe wholeheartedly and head-over-heels in, it is this. Your role, your identity, your goddamn ectogenetic destiny.

You lean against the skeletally smooth trunk, ignoring the throb in your shoulder, turning your katana in your grasp. Loose, ready, alert.

"What ho, chum?" The face that drops down before you, swinging upside down from a low branch, is a monster's: green leering skull, empty eye sockets.

Your blade is against her throat, pressing against the grubby skin. The monster's skull flips upward like goggles to the crown of her head.

And then she smiles, all flashing eyes and bright teeth.

"I say, is this how you greet a bosom friend?" Easily, so easily, she somersaults free of your reach and lands squarely before you, hands on her hips. Her knuckles are filthy, broken open, bloody and spangled with sand. She's been fighting. She shakes a lock of hair from her eyes and her smile just gets wider and wider. "Dina Strider, as I live and breathe."

She is your height, but built for power rather than, as you are, for speed. Clad in well-worn olive drab cut-offs and a snug shirt that emphasizes heavy breasts (you can't help noticing this, you are a teenager), she is broad-shouldered, her holster slung low across hips as curved and capacious as the horizon, her hair a riot of dreadlocks. Her smile --.

"Jackie," you whisper, hoarse and needy and useless, all over again.

She claps you on your bad shoulder and you sway. "Took you long enough!" she says and slides her arm around your waist. "Let's get you inside, shall we?"

You stumble a little, despite yourself, and when she steadies you, pressed against your side, you do it again. Just to feel again the warm pressure, the reality, the dare you say it hope of her.