Dirk Strider (Ultimate) (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
uber_marionettist) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
victory_road2019-11-10 06:44 pm
uber_marionettist) wrote in victory_road2019-11-10 06:44 pm
Entry tags:
[Saitama Voice] OK
Who: Dirk Strider and anyone on the Sevii Islands
Where: The... the Sevii Islands
When: Post-Aether
Summary: [Pigeon Meme Voice] Is This A Vacation?
Rating: PG-13 for swears and whatever else falls out of Dirk's mouth
Dirk's relationship with the ocean is the subject of such elaborate metaphor that it more than qualifies as a uniquely expansive personal conceit. He can read the ocean better than he can other human beings, and (assuming one is not taking into consideration his cumulative and increasingly fractal selfhood) has spent twice as much of his life with it than he has humanity as a whole.
And yet in all the bullshit context I just typed, he's barely ever experienced the actual seashore.
So.
After rejecting the ferry as too crowded and unwilling to turn his back on an opprtunity he wouldn't otherwise have, Dirk Strider Hits The Beach (TM).
One Island:
So many ocean Pokemon resemble parts of the world he grew up with; the primary difference is that none of them are stark white or actively want to eat him. They're still basically the same, though. Wingull, for example, are loud, innumerable, and bold to the point of being obnoxious. Fish are... fish, and a lot of the same ones that live in fresh water are also present in the sea, which is.... just how it goes around here, really. It'd almost be nostalgic if he had any fondness for all the ways the postapocalypse was prepared to kill him.
This 'safe' ocean is almost precious. Twee.
He doesn't have a fishing rod, but he doesn't need one. Catching fish with his bare hands is one of those skills he has very little use for these days, but he is fully confident he still has it. He doesn't take off his shades before he dives in, still near enough to shore that his feet touch the bottom.
There's one particular kind of fish darting in the shallows, little ones that consistently zip off into deeper water or curve away from his human legs as he wades in. They all look ready to burst into tears. No weirder than anything else so far.
It doesn't matter what his motives are for catching them. Not because he doesn't catch any, but because he does. Just one.
A small, silvery-blue body that wriggles frantically in his grasp, its huge, plaintive eyes lighting up like headlights.
Suddenly he's surrounded, covered in them--engulfed, briefly, metaphorically drowning in literally hundreds of sardine-like bodies, converging around him and closing over him like a swarm of insects. The fish in his hands breaks free and disappears somewhere into the whole, a whole that breaks the surface, breaching skyward as one. A massive fish-shaped leviathan, the adumbration of 'fish' as a concept, shimmering and shifting like the visual likeness of seasickness, like the feeling of one's stomach just before you throw up.
Still cradled by the warm familiarity of seawater, Dirk stares up at the beast as its shadow eclipses his form, his face impassive. Sopping, stoic, and one (1) second fromdisaster impact.
"Hm."
Four Island: Vacation Daze
Taking this archipelago one island at a time is practical from a certain point of view, but the longer Dirk spends island-hopping, the more he feels himself unspooling from whatever central concept of his physical body he generally adheres to, travelling across the surface of the sun-speckled sea and on towards the vast horizon as--okay, do we really need to go over the infinite self ocean metaphors again?
Suffice to say he's getting lost while staring out over the ocean more and more frequently and for longer periods each time.
He can probably be found standing or sitting or just lying the fuck down somewhere in the sand, staring out over the ocean and totally checked the fuck out. He also last slept about 50 hours ago, but while he doesn't feel tired in the slightest, would anyone really be surprised if he just.... fell asleep?
Asleep or just Gone (TM), if he's been there for long enough, the local Pokemon have probably started to wonder what the fuck he's doing.
Where: The... the Sevii Islands
When: Post-Aether
Summary: [Pigeon Meme Voice] Is This A Vacation?
Rating: PG-13 for swears and whatever else falls out of Dirk's mouth
Dirk's relationship with the ocean is the subject of such elaborate metaphor that it more than qualifies as a uniquely expansive personal conceit. He can read the ocean better than he can other human beings, and (assuming one is not taking into consideration his cumulative and increasingly fractal selfhood) has spent twice as much of his life with it than he has humanity as a whole.
And yet in all the bullshit context I just typed, he's barely ever experienced the actual seashore.
So.
After rejecting the ferry as too crowded and unwilling to turn his back on an opprtunity he wouldn't otherwise have, Dirk Strider Hits The Beach (TM).
One Island:
So many ocean Pokemon resemble parts of the world he grew up with; the primary difference is that none of them are stark white or actively want to eat him. They're still basically the same, though. Wingull, for example, are loud, innumerable, and bold to the point of being obnoxious. Fish are... fish, and a lot of the same ones that live in fresh water are also present in the sea, which is.... just how it goes around here, really. It'd almost be nostalgic if he had any fondness for all the ways the postapocalypse was prepared to kill him.
This 'safe' ocean is almost precious. Twee.
He doesn't have a fishing rod, but he doesn't need one. Catching fish with his bare hands is one of those skills he has very little use for these days, but he is fully confident he still has it. He doesn't take off his shades before he dives in, still near enough to shore that his feet touch the bottom.
There's one particular kind of fish darting in the shallows, little ones that consistently zip off into deeper water or curve away from his human legs as he wades in. They all look ready to burst into tears. No weirder than anything else so far.
It doesn't matter what his motives are for catching them. Not because he doesn't catch any, but because he does. Just one.
A small, silvery-blue body that wriggles frantically in his grasp, its huge, plaintive eyes lighting up like headlights.
Suddenly he's surrounded, covered in them--engulfed, briefly, metaphorically drowning in literally hundreds of sardine-like bodies, converging around him and closing over him like a swarm of insects. The fish in his hands breaks free and disappears somewhere into the whole, a whole that breaks the surface, breaching skyward as one. A massive fish-shaped leviathan, the adumbration of 'fish' as a concept, shimmering and shifting like the visual likeness of seasickness, like the feeling of one's stomach just before you throw up.
Still cradled by the warm familiarity of seawater, Dirk stares up at the beast as its shadow eclipses his form, his face impassive. Sopping, stoic, and one (1) second from
"Hm."
Four Island: Vacation Daze
Taking this archipelago one island at a time is practical from a certain point of view, but the longer Dirk spends island-hopping, the more he feels himself unspooling from whatever central concept of his physical body he generally adheres to, travelling across the surface of the sun-speckled sea and on towards the vast horizon as--okay, do we really need to go over the infinite self ocean metaphors again?
Suffice to say he's getting lost while staring out over the ocean more and more frequently and for longer periods each time.
He can probably be found standing or sitting or just lying the fuck down somewhere in the sand, staring out over the ocean and totally checked the fuck out. He also last slept about 50 hours ago, but while he doesn't feel tired in the slightest, would anyone really be surprised if he just.... fell asleep?
Asleep or just Gone (TM), if he's been there for long enough, the local Pokemon have probably started to wonder what the fuck he's doing.
no subject
He rolls his eyes in response to Dirk saying he said sorry already, sure, ok well, it was a weird fucking thing to do so while he might have forgiven him for it, he's not going to stop ribbing him over it.
"Well, maybe there wouldn't be a told-you-so if you hadn't treated her like crap for months," he says, and then stops, and thinks. "Ok, there might still be anyway, but she'd still be trying to help you." He sighs, uncrossing his legs and sticking them out in front of him on the sand. A little bit off in the distance, Adagio is frolicking in and out of the surf, kicking her hooves up behind her joyfully. "Do you actually really think Jane here is totally irrelevant or is it the sort of thing where you know you have to go back so you are telling yourself only the one at home matters?"
no subject
"....holy shit, dude." Really not gonna let that one go, is he? But instead of trying to explain anything this time, Dirk just... sighs. "You should know the answer to that by now."
Hnnrgh. A lot of the sand just sticks to his palms and gets into his gloves instead.
"....I know it's exciting for you to be able to call up your favourite franchise faces here, but you're the resident ghost here. Putting on your tinfoil hat isn't going to reveal the hidden conspiracy. There isn't one."
Well. There is. But not like that.
"If 'Jane' is relevant to any canons, it's not mine."
no subject
"She got really far, actually, so she is either just an earlier version of the one from the canon you came from, or she's from mine, which means she's one of yours just by default of you being a bunch of doomed Dirks." If Dirk hasn't taken the towel by now, either way John drops his hand back into his lap. "I don't know, I tried not to talk about it but it's hard to avoid it. As long as you're still here, it is pretty much just me, the 'resident ghost' and doomed or past Jane who will understand basically anything about the history of you and the Game. Mostly just Jane, honestly!"
Adagio stops mid-frolic and eyes the two of them before starting to amble across the sand towards them.
"So, whether or not she is relevant or I am relevant kind of doesn't matter at this point! Not while we're here."
no subject
Instead, he's silent for a good two or three seconds after John finishes.
".... no. She won't understand anything."
His voice comes out as much dead as deadpan, and he makes no move to correct that.
The Game is so much a part of it all, and yet so much of it is past tense in a way that prohibits him from even trying to talk about it, let alone wanting to. And what would he even say? The part of it that she understands--no, not even understands, even what she simply knows--even the part of it that she really knows, the Jane he left behind to manage Earth C in his absence, was just a fraction of his own. A mere fleck on the surface of his knowledge and his experience, as his own collective Self.
"I get that you want to mediate. You want to fix this. Or fix me."
Oh, yes, he's noticed. You're not sly, John.
"And I get that that's because that's just what you do, but literally none of this is all that personal. It just is."
He finally takes the towel to his arms after that, like he didn't just slap whatever intended goodwill John was trying to extend right out of John's hands.
no subject
"It seems pretty personal to me," he says, eventually, "or like you think it is safer to build a rude wall than change what you are doing that isn't working at all. You keep making things out to be super, uh, fatalistic but I don't think you're right about any of it. Or at least you're making sure nobody knows enough to know if you're right. Why won't you meet me in the middle here? Why does it have to be all or nothing?"
no subject
Dirk rubs his face with the towel, pushing his shades up in the process, just briefly. His eyes are closed, though, and they never do end up being seen since the shades just drop back onto the prominent bridge of his strong nose after. They take a little tweaking to be fully in place, but not much.
He doesn't say anything as he bundles the towel up in his hands; then he stands, reaching out to drop it on John's torso as he rises.
"I see where this is going and while it's been fun, I'm going to have to cut you off there."
He expected something like this, but John really took his time getting here.
"There's nothing I can tell you that I haven't already said. And you don't want to fucking listen, so we're done here."
no subject
"I could really easily have called you a lost dumbass cause by now. Maybe if I was a smarter guy I would have. What have you actually told me so far that wasn't just 'do what I say without question'? And 'oh shit oh shit, John asked a single question I have to end the conversation'?"
no subject
"I've answered a lot of your questions, actually."
Dirk is aware, on hearing it, of how terse his voice is, how slowly he spoke and how specifically he enunciated it--even moreso than usual, all coupled with the fact that it's loud, for him. Which is still somewhere south of a normal speaking voice.
He's gotten very good at this, actually.
no subject
"I guess you're just bad at answers."
no subject
Dirk has answered far more questions from John than he has anyone in recent memory. It's not something he's proud of. He's been desperate, and he can see that all too clearly, whether or not John can. But with that in mind, he won't stand here and take being told those answers were inadequate when he's given John almost everything he's asked for.
no subject
Adagio finally makes her way to the two of them and looks between them uneasily for a moment before wandering over and sticking her chin on top of John's head.
no subject
It's no small thing to say that the deadpan of his voice is even less deliberate, but he's gotten comfortable with that part of himself too.
"John. Don't be a bitch."
no subject
"Take your own advice, dude!" He reaches up to rest both his hands around the top of Adagio's snout and she huffs and leans in a bit more. "I don't see why everything has to be such a big stupid secret."
no subject
This cannot be that hard to grasp. It can't. It's so fucking simple. He feels like--
--feels like he's talking to Jake. Round and round the point they fucking go, when it will stop, nobody knows.
"If I explained it to you, it wouldn't be a secret any more."
no subject
"Or at least super convenient for you! What would happen if it wasn't a secret? Or am I not even allowed to ask why I can't ask why you're keeping so many secrets?" He smirks in a way that tilts the corners of his mouth down, like he's trying to hide a smile. "If that is the case can I ask why I can't ask why I can't ask why you are keeping these secrets secret?" He chuckles after, completely incapable of maintaining a straight face for a single joke.