i'm gonna go to bed now hgh but i just started thinking again about a little something :)

since R-XC can't really leave cult premises due to being a missing person, Mortimer will sometimes leave and bring back goodies for him if requested he has the time. it's usually fine since R-XC can almost always answer questions of underlings if Mortimer is busy

Characters:  John Egbert, Dave Strider, Karkat Vantas Ships:  John/Dave/Karkat, John/Dave, Dave/Karkat, John/Karkat Other Tags:  Post-Retcon Meteor, Dream Bubbles, Internalized Homophobia, Internalized Xenophobia, Closets, Coming Out, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, Ashen Romance | Auspistice, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Troll/Human Sloppy Makeouts, Polyamory Negotiations, Pillow & Blanket Forts, Fat Vriska Jokes, Unreliable Narrator, References to Depression Rating:  Not Rated

Hi followers, now that Polyswap reveals are out (a few days ago now), I can fess up to writing this 20 kw JohnDaveKat thing about making out in literal supply closets, that I wrote for @cassandraooc (check out her art and AO3, she’s tops!).  Shout-out also to @katreal-fic for her help as a sounding board and general pompoms while I was writing this.

R^4 fans:  this was my May/June, I have not forgotten you!  But if you like all the dream bubble romance and the awkward poly negotiations Rose and Kanaya have been having about Dave, you might give this one a look too.

Process discussion (as best as I can recall it) under the cut, as with other swap assignments I’ve done, for anyone who’s interested in the (long, spoilery) story of what the hell I was thinking exactly when I wrote this thing.

So my giftee’s prompts were -- by her own admission -- written in a bit of a sleep-deprived haze (I had to laugh as I read them, haven’t we all been there at some point, I know I lost some sleep over mine).  We were each required to provide between three and six prompts for polyships (3-6 characters each) that we wanted to see depicted in gift fic or art.  Cassandra’s OT3 was JohnDaveKat, which sported a string of elaborate sub-prompts (“medievalstuck!”, “soulmates!”, “haunted house!”, etc.) -- along with an invite to not use any of those and just write whatever I felt like.  Other prompts for Dave/Sollux/Karkat, Jane/Callie/Roxy, and Rose/Kanaya/Jade were basically completely open-ended.

I’m trying to remember exactly how I seized upon the idea I ended up executing.  Although some of my other works feature polyships, such as Kankatrezi (The Cafe Mocha Caper) and Daverosemary (foreshadowed in R^4), the process of how they got together is important for me in ways that I don’t care about as much for canon ships.  I felt some resistance to just picking one of the ships and starting to write it as if it was already established.  Also, people who know my writing know that I like to stick close to in-game or post-game AUs, or at least the broader Homestuck setting, rather than non-game AUs or other settings that remove the characters from the context that made them who we recognize them to be.  So I was going to need some runway and a satisfying premise to run along it with.  But by golly, if Cassandra wanted JohnDaveKat, she was gonna get JohnDaveKat.

The JohnDaveKat prompt I personally found most hilarious and awesome was

John gets turned into a Trickster, and finds Karkat and Dave. In the ensuing candy fueled mess, a lot of pent up emotions and secret crushes get revealed, including Dave realizing and admitting that John was probably his first crush on another boy though he was in denial at the time, and Karkat admitting that his own pitch crush for John never went away. (For his part, John finds out that he might, in fact, be a bit of a homosexual.)

Another JohnDaveKat prompt that turned out to figure in heavily later with the work I ended up producing was

John decides to surprise Dave and Karkat with a visit, only to find them already *quite* busy. Before he can think of what to do or do enough thinking at all to leave, he gets caught, and Dave notices evidence of interest, knows Karkat's still got some pitch feelings, and has some of his own, suggests maybe John stay a bit and they talk over some things and maybe do other stuff later too.

Going with Earth C could also bring the Epilogues material into play, and I briefly toyed with an Epilogues-related scenario that could score multiple polyships at once, before remembering that the Epilogues are hugely polarizing and maybe I want to be double sure about my giftee before giving them such a gift in a fan swap.  A combination of Tumblr-stalking, re-reading the prompts and discreet inquiries showed that my idea wasn’t going to work, largely because Ultimate Dirk is a legendary piece of shit and his presence over against End-Of-Act-7 Dirk would cause real friction with Cassandra’s requests -- which leaned fluffy and offered bonus points for “DirkJake” and “Dirk and Dave being good bros who love each other”.  Maybe I could have just done something similar in a separate Earth C AU without a lot of the Epilogues baggage, but by that point the specific discarded spin on the idea had so thoroughly colonized my brain that I just had to ease the whole thing carefully onto the shelf.  I’d still be keen to write that other fic sometime.  Just not for this particular fill.

So, I took a break for a few days before revisiting the prompt and asking what else I could do.  When I think of John, Dave, and Karkat together, my mind goes immediately back to the “EVERYBODY STFU, I HATE YOU BOTH ETC” memo, in which Karkat tries to dissuade Dave and John from encouraging Terezi’s and Vriska’s flirtations, respectively.  This convo is burned into my head because I’ve VA’ed it -- I draw a lot of inspiration for character dialogue from the time I’ve spent doing goofy voiceovers for them.  And there is a lot of grist for the mill here:  Karkat alluding to his pitch crush on John, Dave making fun of Karkat for being gay (while not realizing or admitting how he might be projecting), John being totally clueless about whether he’s attracted to Vriska.  All of these are compatible with the “pent-up emotions and secret crushes” Cassandra asked for, and favors Dave <3 Karkat <3< John as a baseline.

Now, one of the reasons I love writing dream bubble fic is because I am fundamentally lazy.  I can basically use any canon Homestuck pesterlog as a prompt and run with it.  So that’s what I did here.  In the moment that they realize that it’s a dream, the participants are forced to reckon with the way dream bubbles respond to their innermost thoughts.  Deep desires manifest in weird ways; emotional distances contract, go non-Euclidean.  Despite this, the association with dreams simultaneously offer a layer of abstraction or remove to Dave and Karkat -- allowing them to access and slake those deep desires without having to take responsibility for it, either with themselves or each other, during waking hours.  In that sense, John opening the closet is like walking in on them a second time -- the dream bubble itself is their main outer closet, and they already know the jig is up when John diverts the pesterlog down Memory Lane.  This then raises the question of whether they might have wanted John to discover them, deep down?  Perhaps John’s convenient remembering is a sort of wish-fulfillment dream summoning.

From there I already sort of had the fic’s contours and decided it would be best written from John’s POV.  The other nice thing about the dream bubble setting was that it let John participate even during the meteor journey, when Dave and Karkat must have been messing around trying to reverse-engineer their own sexual preferences.  How gay is Dave, and how troubled is he about it at this point in his history?  How does he feel about John finding out?  Does Karkat somehow have some symmetrical hangups that leave him struggling as much as Dave, or is he just a giant crab?  (The literal vs metaphorical closet thing was accidental at first, but once I discovered that I ran hard with it.)

There were still some problems I struggled with, such as how to get John to fall for Karkat pitch-ways when he’s said in canon that he isn’t gay, and when Karkat has said in canon that he’s not pitch for John anymore.  The second problem is easily dispatched by pointing out that Karkat isn’t a reliable narrator of his own preferences, by construction.  As for the first -- John might be no Casanova, but he loves his friends and is fiercely loyal to them, and he also saves his anger for either really important moments (like his GAME OVER fight with Caliborn) or utterly trivial moments (like Con Air not being as good as he thought).  This seemed like a good place for the former.  Once that was laid out, the trio coalesced nicely -- Dave and Karkat need John to keep them honest, and John needs Dave and Karkat to keep him anchored.  John <> Dave and Dave c3< (John <3< Karkat) were dynamics that just showed up on their own.

The interpretation of the ending is left open, but the other difficulty I left unresolved is the timeline mismatch between pre-retcon and post-retcon, and the question of which John it was exactly that showed up in Dave and Karkat’s shared dream.  Pre-retcon Davekat didn’t happen because Dave and Karkat were fighting over Terezi, but post-retcon John died in the explosion of LOWAS and couldn’t live happily ever after having so gloriously enabled post-retcon Davekat.  And I wanted them to live happily ever after.  The two most obvious interpretations I could think of were (a) the three are all on Earth C and dreaming together of each other -- or, more poignantly, (b) pre-retcon John is starting to integrate some of post-retcon dead!John’s memories.  The second possibility leads in the direction of Ultimate John (what would that even be?) so I made sure to place the ending in a time frame that gives the Epilogues a miss -- although the background DirkJake also signals that this is probably an AU that diverges after the ACT 7 victory.

All in all this was really fun to write!  There were lots of other great prompts in the collection, but the ones that grabbed me looked like they would spawn more 20-30 kw novellas and I need to get back to my poor neglected serial!  I’m looking forward to making my way through the treats that others posted, eventually adding some of my own, and of course going through Cassandra’s other stuff.  (Maybe that awesome fantroll Friendsim project will be the next thing to eat my life after this.)