Chapter Text
Your name is Jade Harley, and your gardens are overflowing.
Vines are creeping up the walls of your room, wilting flower buds popping off of them as they twist and turn. Your floor is so strewn with greenery that your feet are permanently stained with chlorophyll. Roxy had helped you set all this up, robbing the un-existence out of a heat lamp and some fertilizer for you. You appreciated it, you really did, and at the time you thought you’d have no problem taking care of so many plants, but now…
You don’t know. You just don’t know.
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Dirk Strider walks through the twin doors of the troll kingdom’s palace, and the sight of its interior nearly makes his eyebrows shoot up past the top of his shades, cartoon-style. Jesus christ, it’s humongous. He can’t help but be proud of his bro for landing himself a place like this, even though sweet-ass housing is kind of inherent to the whole immortal deity thing.
Speaking of Dave, where is he, anyways? Dirk’s supposed to be meeting him and his, uh, not-boyfriend Karkat in the TV room, but that could be anywhere in this huge-ass house. He shouts out his name and a distinctly non-male, non-human face appears in an open doorway. Terezi. Dirk’s only talked to her once or twice, but anyone on Earth C could recognize those red glasses from a mile away.
“Other Dave!” It’s a statement, not a greeting. And, hey, wait, could she smell him from here? He’s not gonna lie, that’s pretty impressive.
“Uh… sup. Do you know where the-”
“TV room’s down the hall, to the left, to the right, and to the left again. The door has got an absolutely delectable picture of the quadrants drawn on it! And if you're really lost, you can always follow the sound of a never-ending flow of flirt-bickering!” She giggles like she’s just heard an old inside joke, but Dirk sees something like loss flash across her face, leaving as soon as it came. Huh. “And when I say never-ending, I mean never -ending. You’re a braver man than I am to be facing that willingly.” She mock-salutes him.
He shoots her a thumbs-up, and the voice in his head reminds him that she's blind, you utter dumbfuck. “Thanks.” He turns to go, and she taps him on the shoulder.
“Hey, if you see Harley, could you do me a favor and tell her to get her gay ass down here? She said she'd let me make her a D&D character today, and I refuse to let her sleep her way through that!”
“Sounds good. Just wondering, do you want the whole Jade, or just her ass?”
Terezi’s face splits into a wicked grin. “Surprise me.”
Dirk continues on his way, zig-zagging through the palace. The doors, he notices, all have something painted on them. Generally, a lot of dicks, but a few are actually-
What the fuck.
A tangle of plants is pouring out one of the rooms and into the hallway, keeping the door propped open. Dirk blinks, almost unsure if what he's seeing is real. The vision persists, and he wonders what in the exact hell is going on. Maybe it's a greenhouse? That's something a lot of these really big places had, right? But, no. Greenhouses were outdoors and had glass walls. This was dead in the middle of the palace. If it wasn't a greenhouse, then what?
Dirk’s curiosity gets the better of him, and he peers inside.
It’s… a bedroom?
Or, rather, was a bedroom. He’s not exactly sure if he can describe the sprawl before him as anything other than a jungle. Pictures of Jake’s island flash in his mind, and he realizes that he’s never seen this many plants in his life. Nothing close to it. Growing up in hell’s very own waterpark doesn’t really give one a chance to get accustomed to natural life.
Without realizing it, he reaches his hand out to touch the nearest sprout. It’s… weird. Cooler to the touch than he was expecting, and drier, too. Like it’s…
Dead.
Like everything in this room is dead.
Dirk darts his eyes around the room, and sees brown cracking open leaves that should be green. He reels back as the smells of rot and abandonment hit his nose, sending his head spinning. Something about it hits a chord deep in his mind, and he jumps back to a time before the game, a time of sitting on his bed, trying to muster up the motivation to work on his robots, draw the drawings he had promised to his friends, watch a cartoon, take a shower, something, anything-
Whoa. Dirk takes a step back and runs a hand through his hair, letting out a shaky laugh for good measure. He couldn’t have seriously just worked himself up into a panic over a leaf and a strange smell . That's a whole new level of pathetic, even for him. Starving orphan on the streets of London in the freezing winter level of pathetic. The emotional equivalent of asking passerby if they could spare some pence for a bowl of soup, or whatever the fuck it was that those starving orphans would say. Something like that.
Besides, it’s not like he’s here to peek around into weird rooms anyways. He’s got no shortage of weird in his life. Plenty of weird to be found on Earth C. He’s here to watch shitty romcoms with Dave and Karkat, and there's not a thing in this world that can stop him. Fuck yeah. Fuck yeah.
He turns and walks out of the room, immediately colliding with Jade Harley.
“Shit!” Her glasses clatter to the floor, and Dirk winces, hearing them hit the linoleum. By some stroke of luck, however, they’re intact when she picks them up, and he breathes a sigh of relief.
“Fuck, uh- sorry-”
“No, no, it’s okay.” Jade holds up a hand. “I wasn’t… looking where I was going.” Her tone’s odd. Filled with thought and not quite there, like she’s halfway in a dream. Dirk knows the feeling.
He remembers the favor he promised Terezi, but as he opens his mouth to speak, Jade slips past him into the overgrown room.
Dave told him once that Jade is a gardener.
Her far off tone, the room in disarray that smelled of death, all of it struck Dirk with the most sinking sense of deja vu. Yeah. Yeah, he's been there before. He's been there, and he hopes on his life to never go back again.
As he continues on his way, passing room after room, the feeling of someone else’s dread still lingers.
“Took you long enough.” When he finally gets there, Dave’s on the couch next to Karkat, his legs swung up onto the troll boy’s lap.
“You guys gonna give me some room to sit?”
“I don't know. Are we, Dave?”
Ah, yes. Flirt-bickering.
“Need I remind you, Kar-kat , that you were the one to initiate this round of homie cuddling?”
Karkat groans, the snarl gone from his voice. “Do you have to call it homie cuddling?”
“Shit man, maybe I just wanna remind everyone that you’re my number one bro. Ever think of that? Huh?” Karkat rolls his eyes, and Dave turns his attention towards Dirk. “There's a beanbag chair on the floor for you, dude.”
He flops down into the beanbag, and Karkat presses play on the movie. It’s some rom-com, entertaining enough but not really his thing. His mind’s still stuck on earlier, running it over again and again, trying to unravel it enough to figure out what it was that unnerved him so deeply. To no avail, however. He’s met only with a growing sense of concern.
During a lull in the movie, Dave talks about a party that Rose and Kanaya are throwing Friday night, and asks Dirk and Karkat if they’re going. Karkat says he wouldn’t miss one of Kanaya’s parties for anything, and Dirk shrugs and says that Roxy’s probably gonna drag him. A party. He’s never really been much for those. Large crowds tended to freak him out a little bit, but maybe this party could give him an opportunity to answer the question weighing down on his mind:
Is Jade Harley okay?