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He wakes up surrounded by white.
For a moment he assumes he’s somehow fallen asleep in the Inbetween - not that he’s ever done that before; in fact, quite the opposite, he’d always reckoned you physically couldn’t - but time travel’s not the most comprehensible thing, so he’s not about to rule it out.
Then he notices that he’s actually not staring at the high marble-like ceilings of the other dimension. This ceiling is low, so low it’s possible his head would hit it if he stood, and made from concrete rather than quartz.
Home dimension, then.
The bed he’s lying in is white, too - nobody’s taken the effort to dye it a more fun colour, which suggests this place was set up in emergency circumstances. Maybe he’s been found by someone. That’ll be fun, he jokes to himself. Maybe the spiral has spat him out somewhere they don’t ask questions, or they ask too many, and he’s about to be brought to trial. Maybe he’s in a war. Maybe he’s in THE war, and the people from his present day don’t even know who he is yet. That one would be fun. He can imagine the face of…
Uh.
That’s not ideal.
He can’t pull up a face from home.
The more he leans over the gap in his mind, like a crater in the landscape, the more he realises what a gaping and terrible thing it is. The first sign of disaster is that home is only pulling up a cave, a few nondescript hills, maybe some wood, and a bookshelf overlooking a three-man bed. No names, no faces, no relationships he can latch on to. He’s a lone figure in his mind, a castoff from the Inbetween, a lonely little K-
K…
K?
Is it K?
No. That can’t be his name.
Oh, fuck, he’s forgotten his name.
“You took too much,” he whispers, harshly, to nobody. It occurs to him that there’s no clock ticking, although he’d thought there would be one. There should have been one.
Who was he trying to talk to?
He bristles, bunching up the pale grey sleeves of his hoodie into balls around his fingers, feeling small. One thing at a time, he supposes, sitting up in the bed and surveying the room. It’s totally nondescript, empty but for a chair across the floor that has a dark blue jacket slung over it. The walls are barren; no windows. The door’s made of spruce and he can’t peek through it. This is his little prison cell, for now.
A voice he expects to hear is strangely silent. Not that he has anything to compare “strange” against.
He strains muscles that don’t manifest in this dimension, tensing his omnipotence, trying to get it to drag him back to the place where he knows what the hell’s going on, but the powers that won’t be, apparently, have taken the rest of today off. It’s like somebody pruned the vines that climbed him, or like they’ve slipped or withered away, leaving little gaps all over his quintessence.
He feels very, and unusually, alone.
A few minutes pass before he hears any external noises being made - rustling, down a hallway, and then footsteps. Someone’s pushing his door open. He backs up against the wall at the corner of the bed, playing with the hems of his sleeves. They’re unsettlingly pristine, like this sweater’s brand new. Maybe it is. Maybe it was a gift from the Inbetween - it definitely goes with the place.
“Oh, shit.”
The stranger stops short in the doorway. It’s like he wasn’t expecting K to be there.
“Um, hi?”
He shakes his head lightly, smiling, struck speechless. “Baby, you - you woke up!”
“I am, in fact, awake,” K (baby?) smiles, hoping his nervousness doesn’t show.
“That - baby, that’s crazy - let me go get Sapnap, oh my god, I didn’t think you were gonna -” The stranger’s smile is bright and dancing, like a stream splashing up against the pebbles of his cheeks. His hands shift on the doorframe like he’s not sure where to put them, and then he’s whirling in place, dashing out into the hall again, the heavy hardwood door swinging shut behind him so all that K can see is a flash of yellow on white before the man is gone. There’s yelling, there’s laughing, and then there’s two sets of footsteps running on the other side of the wall towards him, heavy feet trailing light, murmurs he can’t catch floating through the air before the door busts back open and -
“Karl!”
Oh. That’s what the K is for, then. Probably.
“Hi, Sapnap,” he fills in, because who else could this new stranger be, based on what the other guy said?
“Karl,” Sapnap steps into the room, shoulders low, “beautiful, you scared us half to death. You gotta start tellin’ us where you’re going one of these days, okay?”
“I don’t know about that.”
The two men laugh, as the shorter of the pair flits over to the empty chair and grabs what can only be his jacket. “Okay, secret-keeper. You gonna tell us where you got the new sweater?”
Oh. “I know as much as you do. I just woke up with it.”
“Baby, you gotta be kidding.”
“I’m serious!”
Dead air fills the spot where the stranger’s name should go. Karl knows, in this instant, that they won’t be introduced.
But he’s polite, so he’ll pretend to know these people for as long as it takes him to remember.
“Sweetheart,” Sapnap starts, setting up on the bed next to Karl and laying out a hand for Karl to take if he so wishes, “do you know how long you were out?”
He shakes his head. The Inbetween has taken that ability from him. Usually the ticking of the -
What?
No. It’s always been the Inbetween. There’s nothing missing. There was never anything missing.
“It’s, uh, it’s been a couple of days, baby. Nearly a week. We’ve been keeping an eye on you, but it’s super hard to feed somebody when they’re asleep. We kinda…”
Gave up hope goes unspoken.
“We knew you’d wake up,” Sapnap fills in. “Eventually. And now you’re here!”
“Do you feel alright?”
Karl considers. Sapnap and the stranger are definitely making him feel more than welcome in a foreign environment. The fact he can’t remember present day isn’t exactly helping, nor is the knowledge that these men must be very important to him, given all the pet names, but he just can’t quite place them. And yet… He does, in a sense, feel alright. In that he’s mostly feeling nothing at all.
“Yeah. I should probably eat.” He doesn’t remember… ever eating, actually.
“No shit,” the stranger mutters, “you were in a fucking coma. I’ll get you some bread, okay, baby?”
“Okay.”
“I love you, Karlos.”
He smiles and waves in response.
“Oh, fuck you, you’re not gonna do it?”
The question catches him off guard. “I - uh - love you too?”
“Fine. Live without this gorgeous meow. Your loss.”
The stranger pulls on his jacket, tucking something in at the back, and heads back outside, leaving Karl alone with Sapnap.
They do nothing but stare at each other for a moment. Then Sapnap speaks.
“You really feeling alright? Are you still tired?”
Karl nods, knowing it’s the sensible answer, and feeling some level of truth behind it. “Tired, hungry, a little confused. You know, the sort of thing you’d expect from a guy who’s been in a coma for half a week.”
And Sapnap laughs, and leans into him like they’re intimate. “I really missed you, man.”
“I would love to say I missed you too, but I was kinda asleep.”
“Where’s the sweater from, really?” he asks, frowning, tracing a line up Karl’s arm. It’s the kind of gesture he’s probably supposed to appreciate, but it just makes him shiver, and he has to focus not to flinch. He doesn’t know Sapnap, after all.
“Not a clue,” he says instead, and pulls at the hems again. It’s comfy. The Inbetween must have really splurged on this one. Something about the darker spiral right at the centre of the garment feels achingly familiar - but he knows it’s never meant anything to him. Maybe that’s just timeline fuckery, he doesn’t know. If it is, whatever was written out of history can’t have been good or important in the first place, especially not compared to his life as the Inbetween’s ambassador.
The stranger bursts back through the door carrying the promised bread and a bottle of water, which Karl takes gratefully and nurses (his stomach’s kinda small right now) while the two men settle in around him and start asking questions about his wellbeing. Everything’s innocent enough, and luckily they don’t seem to recognise the possibility that he might have lost his memory of what they mean to him.
Good. That would mean too many questions.
“And your heartrate’s good too?”
“C’mon, Alex, he’s clearly had enough of this shit,” Sapnap chides. A name at last!
“I don’t mind,” he fills in, over Alex’s quiet stuttering that might precede anything, from a cussing out to a calm rebuttal. He doesn’t remember what Alex is like, after all, and just in case he’d rather not find out.
“No, that was pretty much the last one - Karl. Baby. Lemme at you.”
He curls in on himself. He’s never been too fond of the concept of somebody touching him, and he’s definitely had enough of that for a lifetime ever since the day he -
What?
Anyway. He’s all good. He bats Alex’s arm away with a sweater paw. “No, thank you. My heart is fine.”
“Really? Mine’s pretty fuckin’ broken that I can’t get close to yours, babe. Come on.”
“No,” he whines, withdrawing further, pressing into the wall. Sapnap goes to hold him by the shoulder, pauses, and uses the outstretched hand to lightly smack Alex in the leg instead.
“Q! Really? He said no. If he’s not comfortable today he’s not fuckin’ comfortable. Jeez.”
Karl can only assume that Q is a nickname Alex has acquired for whatever reason. Sapnap is probably a nickname too, if he’s being logical - he’s never met anyone on a trip that had a name like that. It’s always James or Robin or Benjamin, names that sound like they fit in. He wonders what Sapnap’s real name is.
“Sorry,” Alex begrudges, looking away, “sorry, Karl.”
“It’s okay.”
“You’re really fine?”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“You want the food yet?”
“That’d be nice.”
They offer him the bread and he starts chipping away at it, his appetite growing now that his stomach’s been reminded that it deserves several meals a day instead of nothing. While he eats the two men sit in silence, staring at each other, exchanging silent messages that Karl’s not sure if he should understand. He’s still not sure what his relation to them is, beyond the suggestion that it’s probably romantic, given all the pet names and the touching.
He’s not planning to ask, following the assumption that it would be a little late to tell them he doesn’t remember them after the whole conversation he just had, so he really hopes he’s able to find out.
Eventually they declare their intent to leave him alone “to recover”, give him soft goodnights that he reciprocates with a held-back smile, and disappear back wherever they came from.
Karl is alone.
He thinks, then, about his life - what he knows and what he remembers, which are suddenly and unexpectedly two very different things. Because he knows this is home, knows that Q and Sapnap are his… somethings, knows they’re allowed to touch him in a way he doesn’t recall being used to and knows that beyond that door are a whole host of other people he’s been acquainted with since he moved here.
But he remembers nothing but a big blank white dimension of numbness, a trip to the beach, spinning under a high and velvet-brown ceiling, snaking through the minds of strangers as little more than a voice in the wind back when his powers were weaker, dying by the sword of a strange and threatening hybrid while in another man’s body. Stories, all. Tales he’s visited, learned to tell. Tales where everybody dies, except the ones who kill, and Karl…
Well, he’s not dead, but might he not as well be, ending up a blank slate like this?
Maybe this is the worst outcome of all. Part of him might be trying to tell him that he’d known this was coming for a while, but he’s not sure if he can believe himself, so he quiets it. Maybe he should have just died rather than present himself to the world again like this, pretending he knows who the people he’s loved are, pretending he hasn’t lost the last ties he had to the present, pretending he knew what his name was before Alex told him.
He can at least keep them from hurting.
Them, who he’s never met, as far as he remembers, but who he must have really loved if he let them get so close to him. Them, who call him “baby” and “sweetheart” and “gorgeous” and who only want to ask him how he is and tell them they worried for him, never what’s going on with themselves. Them, who have shown him nothing but kindness in all his living memory.
And then he realises that he wants to know them, because they seem so worth knowing.
So he’ll pretend.
(Karl learns that Sapnap’s favourite colour is blue, and that Quackity is what Q is short for, and exactly what the flash of yellow Alex had hiding under his jacket was.
Karl learns the way that Spanish sounds on his fiance’s tongue, quick and sharp and spitfired when he’s angry, soft and languid and palpably adoring when he’s feeling good. He learns the words again, guapito, mi novio, mi corazón, mi amor, and they come to him like muscle memory when they’re back inside his head, and the first time he swaps one back it’s no surprise to Quackity but Karl is quietly proud.
Karl learns their history through quips and injokes and late-night references to the reason Sapnap wakes up sweating, clutching at the blankets like he’s clutching for a weapon, three medium-sized men in one big bed that feels too small to contain so much history, so much trauma. He learns the name Dream and he doesn’t ask who that is, only feels his heart breaking when he works out what the man used to mean to his fiance, and what he stands for now.
Karl learns and he learns and he learns. The Inbetween will call again - it always does - and when he goes there’s no telling what he’ll lose. But inbetween the Inbetween’s demands, in the quiet times, in the here and now, he learns the lines of his lovers’ palms and he offers them the warmth of his own.
He pretends he knows why they love him too.
They’ll never know, and that’s good. This is not ideal, but this is good. This is enough.)